Conscious Co-Stewardship

Challenging extraction‑era housing norms with new mental models that serve everyone.

"Passive Investing"
is a Category Error.
There's a Better Way.

Redesigning Rental Housing

Governments presumably protect the innocent and vulnerable with housing laws that we have discovered are meaningless without enforcement. In my systems study of response to the vulnerable, unrepresented tenant role asking the system for justice, it instead responding with harm that ascended without end until I literally had a nervous breakdown. Shortly afterward, I tested at a 76/80 PCL-5 PTSD score - an "extreme" level that correlates with a soldier experiencing boots on the ground armed combat or a long term physical violence victim.

This doesn't surprise someone familiar with Systems Thinking. Changing rules is not the high level system intervention. If you don't change the thinking the rules are designed to mediate against, the powerful who think things should be different find ways around the rules.

Donella Meadow, in her treatise Places to Intervene in a System, wrote that the highest level of intervention for systemic change is at the level of paradigm - the thinking that created the system. In her model, changing "The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints)" is number 5 of 12.

Changing the rules without changing the paradigm means that rules which don't agree with a central paradigm held by property owners and managers will often be circumvented - to the detriment of the vulnerable that the rules are designed to protect. As we have found. For deep change, a shift in paradigm is required.

Rental Housing has a Paradigm Problem called "Passive Investing"

Passive Investing, when one drills down to its hidden, underlying assumptions, really means Unconscious Abdication. And its basis for existing falls apart under any reasonable amount of system study.

It completely misses that it is the end user who feeds money into the system who sets the value of the service of rental housing. There are reasons for missing this. There is a documented Housing Crisis in Charleston where the beautiful rivers and Atlantic Ocean block expansion in many directions. Further, there are perception-distorted system conditions in Rental Housing in general such as lease agreements locks in terms, the cost of switching is high, and landlords can game online reviews.

Unconscious Abdication often means the owner looks in the other directly while bad-actor agents abuse tenants. They can even think this is in their best interest because these distortions make it more difficult to readily see who sets the value, especially when you also consider the Command-and-Control top-down management style left over from the Industrial Age factory design era also deviate from Systemic Truth - and it is similarly prevalent. But prevalent doesn't mean true, and if you Zoom out enough, you can still see it is the end-user, the tenant, who sets the value. So, only by designing a housing system from the tenant point of view can you fully get rid of waste and maximize profits. A UK Systems Thinking Housing Study involving my friend, Vanguard Method inventor John Seddon, proved this point conclusively.

Study Design: Between 2004-2005, the UK Office of the Deputy Prime Minister sponsored three housing organizations to test whether redesigning services around tenant needs (rather than internal targets and procedures) would improve both service quality and efficiency. Seddon's Vanguard Method was applied to study work flow from the tenant's perspective, identify waste, and redesign systems to deliver "what matters to the customer."

The Counter-Intuitive Hypothesis: Conventional management wisdom says you must choose between quality and cost. The study tested whether designing services around tenant value would simultaneously improve both.

Tees Valley Housing (Responsive Repairs Service)

• Before the intervention, 45% of all repair calls were "failure demand" – tenants calling back because repairs weren't completed right the first time, creating a workload the system generated for itself
• Average repair completion time: from 46 days down to 5.9 days
• After the intervention? Customer satisfaction: 75% rated service 10/10
• Failure demand: reduced from 45% to 23%
• Annual cost savings: £115,000 (£35,000 from reduced processing steps + £80,000 from fewer jobs sent to expensive contractors)

Leeds South East Homes (Vacant Property Turnaround)

• Time to repair and re-rent vacant units: from 50+ days down to 25 days
• Number of vacant properties: from 240 down to 118 over 18 months
• £360,000 in rental income recovered annually – money the landlord was previously losing while properties sat empty awaiting repairs; faster turnaround meant rent payments resumed sooner

Preston City Council (Rent Collection & New Tenancies)

• Time until first rent payment received: from 34 days down to 3 days (pilot area)
• New tenants falling into arrears: from 43% down to 18%
• Method: Instead of rushing tenants through signing and expecting them to figure out payment later, staff ensured tenants understood what to pay, when to pay, and how to pay before finalizing the lease – setting tenants up to succeed rather than fail

The Finding That Proves Tenant Value Sets System Value

In every pilot, the same pattern emerged: When the system was redesigned to deliver what mattered to tenants (repairs done right first time, homes ready when promised, clear payment terms), three simultaneous outcomes occurred:

1. Tenant satisfaction improved dramatically
2. Operating costs decreased (less waste, less rework, less failure demand)
3. Financial performance improved for owners (faster rent collection, less vacancy loss, fewer contractor costs)

Systems Interpretation: The tenant's definition of value - "repair it right the first time" or "help me understand how to pay" - turned out to be the actual driver of system efficiency. Designing around institutional convenience (targets, procedures, departmental silos) created 45-80% waste across all three pilots. The end-user sets the nominal value. The system either honors that or pays the cost of not honoring it.

Source: "Evaluating systems thinking in housing," Jackson, Johnston & Seddon, Journal of the Operational Research Society (2007); "A Systematic Approach to Service Improvement," Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (2005)

Designing for Demand and Reciprocal Value

Applying Seddon’s "Design to Demand" principle reveals that what tenants truly "demand" is not just a roof, but a sanctuary where their life stories can play out with dignity. When this demand is met through what I have come to call Conscious Co-Stewardship, the tenant stops being a passive "cost" and becomes an Active Partner.

Mechanical or Social System?

Building on the concept of Conscious Co-Stewardship requires a fundamental shift from viewing housing as a mechanical system of extraction to seeing it as a living social system.

This perspective aligns with the systems thinking of Russell Ackoff, who argued that we often make "category errors" by treating social systems (like communities and housing) as if they were simple machines.

When we treat a rental property as a mechanical box to be squeezed for every dollar, we create "failure demand" - a term coined by John Seddon and utilized during those influential housing studies in the UK. Failure demand is the "demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for the customer," such as the high-friction costs of turnover, legal battles, and the constant "repair work" required when a landlord and tenant are in an adversarial relationship.

Designing for Stability, Sanctuary, and Dignity = Profitability

By applying Seddon's "outside-in" design to housing, we see that true efficiency comes from understanding what the resident actually values: stability, sanctuary, and dignity. When housing is treated as a service to tenants rather than a vehicle for pure profit extraction, the focus shifts from "collecting rent" to "providing stable shelter where life stories play out".

This is not merely a moral choice but a strategic one; it replaces the fragile, high-friction "Extractive Model" with a resilient "Stewardship Model". In this framework, the tenant becomes a "high-value asset manager of their own home" and a partner in maintaining the property's value, which drastically reduces the waste inherent in traditional management.

Treating rental housing as a service dissolves the "Capitalist Trade-off"—the false belief that an investor feel an internal split between humanitarian ideals and financial success. But my Systems Study and the Vanguard Method both show that it isn't humanity that hurts rental property income, it's the "parasite" model where an investor feeds on a host until the relationship dies.

Aligning the roles of the Tenant, Investor, and Property Manager

Much of this is focused on the Landlord, as the designer behind the current system, but this Thought Leadership Position is designed to unify tentant, investor, and property manager around a shared mental model, one based on shared reverence for the shelter life stories play out in.

That is what Conscious Co-Stewardship is about - responsible and cooperative stewardship of revered living space from multiple perspectives working together.

Conscious Co-Stewardahip is the "Solution Paradigm" for the Housing Crisis.

This Better Paradigm is Available as a Thought Leadership Model: Conscious Co-Stewardship (CCS)

Ultimately, this paradigm change moves the housing industry from a state of "learned helplessness" and "futile resistance" to one of "collective power" and "asymmetric leverage". By redefining "Passive Income" not as neglect but as "Friction-Free Income" generated through active stewardship, we create a system that is "antifragile".

The Natural Reciprocity of Well-Designed Social Systems

Residents who feel a sense of belonging and agency are more likely to protect the property and the relationship, effectively "future-proofing" the investment against market volatility. In this way, housing becomes a service that supports human flourishing while simultaneously delivering more reliable financial returns than the old model of extraction ever could.

Building on the principles of Conscious Co-Stewardship (CCS), we must recognize that the shift from a zero-sum to a non-zero-sum game is not just a moral preference, but a transition from a fragile, mechanical system to a resilient, living social one. In the old "Extractive Model," the landlord and tenant are locked in a zero-sum struggle where one's gain is perceived as the other's loss, often leading to a state of "learned helplessness" for the tenant and "moral dissonance" for the investor.

True effectiveness in this system is found by adopting a "symbiotic" model - where the investor’s financial security and the tenant’s dignity are mutually reinforcing, turning what was once an adversarial relationship into a high-leverage partnership.

The Leverage for Change: More Fulfillment of Unmet Higher Values

The Thought Leadership Vector