The COVID-19 crisis has renewed interest in alternative forms of organizing business and investment but our understanding of how these organizations can transform social systems is limited. The purpose of this article is to contribute to this understanding. In the context of one of the greatest transfers of wealth in global retail history that could see unprecedented numbers of businesses close or sold to distant, private interests, the article performs a thought experiment using the analogy of a commercial trust to encourage new ideas and critical reflection on community wealth building. The article introduces systems hijacking—a process of leveraging incumbent forms and systems in which they are embedded for new purposes—as an analytically useful concept for understanding how alternative organizations can transform social systems. The article finds organizational governance is necessary to transcend structural deficiencies in inherited or borrowed forms to make way for transformation.

COVID-19 危机重新激发了人们对组织商业和投资的替代形式的兴趣，但我们对这些组织如何改变社会系统的理解有限。本文的目的是促进这种理解。在全球零售历史上最大的财富转移之一的背景下，可能会看到数量空前的企业关闭或出售给遥远的私人利益，本文使用商业信托的类比进行了思想实验，以鼓励新的想法和批评对社区财富建设的反思。这篇文章介绍了系统劫持——一个利用现有形式和系统来实现新目的的过程——作为一个分析有用的概念，用于理解替代组织如何改变社会系统。