🌊 Part 1 - Stewardship in the Wild
🌊 Stewardship in the Wild
Reflections on the manifesto
When we launched the Be the Waves manifesto, we tried to capture something urgent: the world doesn’t just need more leaders. It needs stewards. People who hold responsibility with conscience, who care for what they touch, and who think about what they leave behind.
Since then, we’ve been asking ourselves: what does stewardship actually look like in practice – not as a definition or theory, but as lived, messy, human experience? How does it ripple through work, life, relationships, and communities?
In this reflection, we explore stewardship in the wild: the currents, the systems, and the ways small actions connect to bigger outcomes. Later, we’ll share the voices of people who are living it – their stories, reflections, and practices that make stewardship real in the world.
From the cell to the system
There is a difference between the big picture and the little picture. And it’s not about dictionary definitions.
So much transformation is framed as changing cells, fixing the smallest unit. But a cell cannot live without a system. Take a white blood cell: on its own, it has no meaning. It only brings life when supported by blood, by platelets, by the liquid that carries it. That liquid needs veins. Those veins need a pump, a heart. A heart needs a body. A body needs fuel. Fuel depends on growth. Growth depends on healthy air, water, and sunlight. And even those depend on the people, structures, and choices that govern how they are sustained.
I have always worked this way, long before I knew to call it ecological: paying attention not only to the smallest part, but to the whole system around it, and to the leaders who shape it.
Whether in public service, private enterprise, charities, or not-for-profits, the same truth holds: change only lasts when the whole system is healthy, not just the parts within it.
Organ-ism: stewardship in action
By organ-ism, I mean people acting together as a living, adaptive whole. It fuses the idea of an organism – life that depends on connection – with organisation – the deliberate act of arranging people and effort. Constructive, because it’s about consciously growing the system from the inside out, while also seeking to influence it from the outside in. Collaborative, because no one steward can shift a system alone. It takes culture, connection, and collective action.
Even a coffee house is not successful if it only serves good coffee. It has to meet the system where it is: the culture, the community, the economics – and sometimes influence that system to follow it. Reform at any level is never just about the parts. It is about stewarding the whole, and when necessary, reshaping the ecology itself.
A living question
So the real question is this: when you lead change, are you only tending to the cell, or are you stewarding the system – maybe even shaping a new one – through organ-ism?
Stewardship isn’t abstract. It isn’t about heroics, titles, or visibility. It begins with the self but ripples out through relationships, organisations, and communities. It asks us to notice what’s entrusted to us, to act with conscience, and to care for what may outlast us.
Looking ahead
In the coming weeks, we’ll explore stewardship even further. We’ll share the voices of people living it – their stories, reflections, and practices – and use Rudyard Kipling’s six honest serving-men (What, Why, When, How, Where, Who) as a lens to deepen the conversation.
These reflections will reveal how stewardship ripples through different lives, professions, and perspectives – showing it not as an abstract ideal, but as something lived, felt, and shared.
Your voice
Before we dive into those stories, we want to hear from you:
What does stewardship mean in your world?
The waves are building. Let’s see where they take us.
Stefan
CEO, Be The Waves | Executive Coach | Father | Citizen
Don’t just lead. Steward. Create stewardship wherever you go. Be the Waves.