Last weekend I took a ramble across Bowen Island, where I live, with a friend and colleague, Annemarie Travers. Annemarie and I have been teaching the Leadership 2020 program for a number of years now and we both love walking: she on the long pilgrimages of the Camino and Shikoku and me in the mountains of southern British Columbia. We are also both interested in managing in complexity.
My friends over at the Social Labs Revolution website have been fielding questions about the prototyping phase of labwork and today published a nice compilation of prototyping resources. It’s worth a visit. It got me thinking this morning about some of the tools I use for planning these days.
Spent an hour in conversation with a friend in the US last night discussing the role of dialogue in connecting communities together. My friend has extensive experience working with immigrant, refugee communities and in working with inner city agencies. He’s been personally affected by Trump’s travel edict as his family members are directly targetted by the current travel ban. He’s a man I respect very much.
We were talking about ways to connect and understand the “other side.” After our conversation I stumbled over this podcast on the “deep story” of what is motivating Trump supporters, and probably both Brexit supporters and other Europeans struggling with how the world is changing and how they perceive their privileges coming apart. We talked about how there is always a thin slice of people that will never sit down with “the other.” We also spoke about the many main street Republicans who feel abandoned by their party and have done since the Tea Party took it over. It comes down to the fact that arguments on economics and policy cannot overrule the emotional aspects of identity, especially when people feel those identities are under assualt through no fault of their own.
In her new book, Strangers in Their Own Land, sociologist Arlie Hochschild tackles this paradox. She says that while people might vote against their economic needs, they’re actually voting to serve their emotional needs
The image of standing in line to get your rewards and watch people stream past you is compelling. It’s one thing to deconstruct this image with data and facts, but first it’s important to understand it and how people deeply FEEL it.
Deep story is fascinating to me. Here in my home community of Bowen Island, we experience tensions from time to time over our deep story. We all have ideas about what we think this place is and who we think we are. To some extent that story is an illusion born in our world views and our desires. In a place like Bowen Island, where most of us moved here from somewhere else, our own deep story includes the deep motivation that brought us here.
And deeper beneath the personal deep story we bring is the emergent and slowly changing story of the island’s identity. Over the last couple of years, as a member of our local Economic Development Committee, I have worked with friends and colleagues to understand our deep story. Once you can see it, it reveals the deep yes’ and deep no’s that make things happen or hold things back. People are often surprised by things that go on in our little community, but understanding the deep story helps to explain where these things come from.
When you understand the deep story, you can find deep places to connect together and important places of engagement and curiosity. Dialogue gets more interesting as we set out to learn about each other, what we care about, what we assume is true, and what is essential to our identity. Strategy that does not take the power of identity into consideration creates implementation plans that will inevitably endure oblique assaults on its efficacy. Understanding the deep story and identity of a place or a person is essential to resilience, collaboration and peacemaking across difference. A healthy community can hold different stories in all their complexity, even when those stories conflict with each other. An unhealthy community pits one story against another, and cynical leaders do the same.
We have a choice as citizens. This podcast helps us become resourceful in making that choice.
Last week we were out in Tofino hosting a three-day leadership workshop on dialogue with sixty people, most of whom were from the Port Alberni and west coast area. In the room were leaders from Hupacaseth, Toquaht, Ahousaht, Hesquiaht, Tsehshaht and Tloquiaht First Nations and Councillors from Ucluelet, Tofino and the Alberni-Clayoquat Regional District. Additionally there were citizens, non-profit workers, community foundation staff, scientists and small business people in the room. It was the kind of gathering that everyone is always saying “has to happen.”
My friend and colleague Bronagh Gallagher and I are in the early stages of creating a learning offering around complexity, facilitation and activism, whereby we try to bring complexity and participatory tools to the work of social change. We’ve been assembling some very interesting sources for our work and she recently introduced me to the work of Micah White who has written about protest and activism from a complexity perspective. I’m working my way through some interviews he gave in support of his book, The End of Protest. Here is one juicy line:
This is fundamental. All effective forms of protest are illegal until they succeed. All revolutions are illegal until they succeed, and then they become the government and all of the sudden these people are celebrated as heroes and all that kind of stuff. What we’re talking about is very real. This is what distinguishes fake protest from real protest. Fake protest is underpinned by the idea that our actions don’t need to be illegal, that we can get permits from the government, that we can have “free speech zones” or we can do scripted arrests; it doesn’t need to be illegal or dangerous or disobedient. I think that’s completely misguided. We didn’t get a permit for Occupy Wall Street. We asked people to bring tents knowing that it was illegal for people to set up tents. We did these behaviors because the legal regime doesn’t matter when you create a protest. You operate outside of the law.
It doesn’t mean they have to be violent. There are lots of different ways to be illegal. But it does mean that you have to say, “I’m trying to change a situation that is so important that I will disobey the law. My protest stands above the law.” And you also have to accept the consequences of that. For Occupy Wall Street seven thousand people were arrested. That’s an astounding number. People had their bones broken. People lost their jobs.
Absolutely. Real protest is always illegal. For sure.
There is an interesting observation here, that the socially acceptable forms of protest, innovation and radical change are only helpful in terms of creating incremental and socially acceptable change. You may shift things but they will be shifted WITHIN the acceptable boundaries. When you start pushing on the boundaries, or fundamentally breaking the boundaries, you will be operating outside of the law. In society, this takes the form of illegal activity. In organizational life this means fundamentally violating the organization’s norms and policies, some of which are unwritten and my not even be visible until you start acting in ways that make them visible.
It is this way with colonizing mindsets embedded in the ways that social institutions, governments and businesses operate in Canada, where there is hardly ever a fundamental challenge to some of the core ideas of colonization, such as the assumption that all private land was legally obtained or that all public land is owned by the Crown. In a society based on colonial power structures, everything goes along fine until some First Nation somewhere stands up to a Canadian law and challenges it’s authority. The act needs to be law-breaking in order for the laws to be rewritten. This is how Aboriginal title has entered Canadian Constitutional law as a valid, binding and important legal concept.
Likewise as organizations and businesses are trying to fundamentally change core practices, they are largely constrained by doing by having such change championed by an approved panel of change makers. Fundamental change comes to organizational life from the outside. It is disruptive. It calls into questions sacred cows about power, management policies, core purposes and priorities. Like activists, change agents are marginalized, dismissed reassigned, and often fired. At best if you are championing fundamental change within an organization you may suddenly find yourself without access to decision makers, left out of strategic cnversations and not allowed to work with and mentor junior staff.
Fundamental change is a threat. As I grow older as a middle class white skinned man, I have found myself on the receiving end of more and more challenges from younger people who don’t look like me. They challenge my assumptions and my ideas. I am beginning to discover that, despite having lots to offer, the way the world is changing around me must necessarily overturn the assumptions I make about the world, the ones that have allowed me to work relatively close to the core of social stability. I aspire to be an ally to those making change from the far margins, but it is not my place to declare myself an ally. People are given status as allies of fundamental change makers. It is not a title you can claim for yourself, no matter how well intentioned you are.
Social change, innovation and reorganization requires a kind of leadership at every level that works at the margins to provoke and overturn and works from the centre to, in effect, not defend the status quo too much from the “threats” from outside. There is no “other side of the fence” in the work of social change. While I’m not sure that there has ever been an orderly revolution in the world,the question for all of us is which side of the revolutionary Möbius strip are you on and what can you do to help what wants to be born?