I’ve been working a lot with youth over the my career in all kinds of fields. This week I got another chance to work with the members of the teens and 20s leadership generation at an event hosted by Cool Vancouver, which is the City of Vancouver’s sustainability plan around greenhouse gas reductions.
I am working with the excellent friends at Karyo Communications, who are logistics wizards, and do they ever know how to write invitations. We put out an invitation to the world and got 160 youth showing up on Wednesday evening to discuss tapping youth leadership to make the strategy hum. We used the World Cafe process to tap the wisdom of these youth, and we got a ton of amazing ideas, from the large scale to the small scale. My favourite small scale idea was for people to buy a universal remote and to go around the city to bars and restaurants and banks and turn off the TV’s that sit in the corner constantly on, with no one watching them.
Some of us who are in our thirties were watching these conversations unfold around us and wondering what is different about this generation of youth leadership. When we were younger we had lots of high ideals, but it seems like active folks in their teens and 20s are combining that with much better information about their causes, thanks to the internet, and eminently practical local solutions. There were a few calls for the downfall of capitalism, but most of the folks who were there had much more do-able local strategies.
Culture jamming, the web, networked advocacy and Cluetrain are all tools of empowerment for young leaders. To my eye, watching them work this week, I think there is an additional factor too, and that is that there seems to be so much more at stake for them NOT to act. I get the sense that young activists are emerging out of a world whose ills are incurable by traditional means and they are emerging into a way of being that sees their own personal leadership and power as the only option for change. No one is going to undo the damage willingly, and no one will listen to and support what these youth are saying and yet they know that every year we wait for a new globlal/local mindset to appear is one less year of opportunity for change. The lack of attention to their causes is the most freeing aspect of their work. They channel their energy into their work.
What is notable about this dance on the edge is that, unlike the 1980s when we llived in terror of nuclear mistakes, there seems to be a lack of fear. Many of these younger folks are fearless at the current state of the world. Call it blind optimism or hope, but to my eye it seems like we are encountering a generation that will be leading our worlds into a place where the only way things change is if we make it happen, and that means choosing small ways to start big things, and doing what you can where you can.
I might be wrong but those of you out there that work with youth can probably confirm something of a shift in approach. How would you label it?
Mipun Mehta is a blogger I love reading, especially for tidbits like this::
“At this restaurant, you don’t get billed for your food. Pay what you like, their slogan reads. It sound unbelievable but there’s a fully volunteer-run, high-end restaurant — Annalakshmi — where they trust that everyone will pay their fair share. And the food was awesome too!
A very kind lady, who has been there since Annalakshmi opened in Singapore 20 years ago, spoke with us for a bit. I asked why she does this, and she replied, ‘I don’t know. It just fills my heart. I don’t really have any expectations. I just do it.'”
Hmmm.
I was once half-jokingly called “optimistic to the point of uselessness” which is a badge I wear with some pride as my fool’s marker.
Optimism has been on my mind today. I’ve just been turning over these words: optimism, hope, faith, responsibility, trust. No reason, no particular cause to examine these ideas, just a little synchronicity in blog land that got me musing a little.
Partly it comes from a bunch of work I am doing in which people in various walks of life are dicovering their emerging futures, and it’s partly about some of the blogs I am reading. For example, today I read this article on overcoming fear, uncertainty and doubt:
Reaching a personal goal brings about a sense of accomplishment and personal satisfaction. To achieve your goal, learn how to identify the gremlins of goal derailment, which primarily consists of FUD. You can defeat FUD imagining yourself achieving your goals, tuning out negative remarks by others, personal negative self-talk and finally, surrounding yourself around others who have similar interests. Once you have learned to defeat FUD, you will have gone along way in achieving your dreams � it happened for Dylan and it can happen for you.
And then I see at Caterina’s blog, she writes about John Stockdale, the one-time US Vice Presidential candidate and survivor of 8 years as a PoW in Vietnam:
How did Stockdale survive when he didn’t know if he were going to live or die or see his family again?
“I never lost faith in the end of the story,” he said, when I asked him. �I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
I didn�t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, �Who didn�t make it out?�
“Oh, that�s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”
“The optimists? I don�t understand,� I said, now completely confused, given what he�d said a hundred meters earlier.
“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We�re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they�d say,’We�re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end�which you can never afford to lose�with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
That’s from Jim Collins’ “Good to Great.”
So my musing is going to questions about strategies for holding open hope without blinding onself to challenge. What do you think?
By the way,
here’s a guy who is in the middle of it all at the moment. Get well soon, Lorne.
I have put some photos up from the Open Space I did in the Fort Rupert big house last weekend. Enjoy!