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?
Recently in BC, we have a had a child die in the care of the state. This does happen from time to time, and when it does a process is triggered whereby the Representative for Children and Youth lanuches an investigation and makes recommendations which usually result in more rules and procedures to govern the child welfare system with the express purpose of never having it happen again.
I work closely with child protection social workers in BC and there is not a single one I know of whose heart does not break when something like this happens. Everyone wears the failure. Social work is difficult not because of the kinds of predictable situations that can be mitigated but because of the ones no one saw coming. The Ministry of Children and Family Development operates under a massive set of procedures and standards about social work practice. But no amount of rules will prevent every case of child death. Just like no amount of rules will eliminate every case of discrimination, every war, every instance of every bad thing that happens to humans.
My son has been working on a project for his grade nine year. At his middle school, graduating students are required to complete a year-long project called a MasterWorks. Finn has chosen the reconstruction of a downhill bike skills park. Earlier this year, our local government flattened the one we had without consultation, and Finn has been part of the team leading the charge to rebuild it in a different location.
My dad has been active in his community working on developing a dog park and also helping the village with it’s official community plan. As a result, he has become an official mentor for Finn on his project and yesterday he sent along some great advice about how to get things done with local government.
Here’s his advise:
Finn:
Your mom told me about your Masterworks project. I would love to share some of my experiences working on projects with the Town of the Blue Mountains. Here are some thoughts to start with if you want to get help from your local government.;
1. Clearly Identify Your Project (New Bike Park)
Describe why this is important to you and your community and other bikers. You are competing with many other municipal projects such as roads, water systems and other things which might have been discussed during your recent election.
Identify any benefits to the community such as a safe place for kids to develop their biking skills and to hang out. A healthy place to play outside without electronics. A showplace for the Municipality.
2. Build a Support Group
Set up a spreadsheet or Word table and add a line for each of your biking friends, their parents and anyone else who will support you. Each line records their name, mailing address, phone number and most importantly, email address. The more names you can get the better. Municipalities will pay attention to groups of people who need something. They often ignore individuals.
Use the email addresses to send out newsletters to the Group whenever something is happening. Ask the Group for additional names of people who might help or offer support.
Provide a copy of the list to the Municipality to show them that you are not alone.
3. Build Bridges
Never bad mouth members of your Council or municipal staff. They were elected by your neighbours or were hired based on their credentials. Getting them mad at you will not help your project.
Find ways to meet individual members of Council or staff to ask for advice on what you need to do to complete your Project. I think you have already done some of this. Do not stop with one meeting. Once you have made some contacts, stay in touch either in person or by phone or email. This shows them that you are serious about your project.
Send a note to each person recently elected, thanking them for being willing to help govern your community. Ask for their support for your project. You can also contact those who lost the election, thanking them for running and asking them for any ideas on moving your project forward.
4. Set Up a Project Plan
I think you have already started this.
1. Create a design for the bike park. Define the dimensions (how much land will be required). What materials will be needed (fencing, ramps, jumps etc).
2. Who will build the Park. Your Support Group? The Town? Local contractor donation of time and equipment?
3. How much will it cost. Where will the money come from? Can your Group do some fund raising? This is always helpful. Municipalities prefer not to fund special interest groups by sharing the costs with all the property owners (tax payers) who may not want to use your Park. I believe the Town is interested in providing another site from land available as public parks.
4. Who will manage the Park. What rules will be required to satisfy the Town so they can avoid liability if someone gets hurt. Usually the Town will cover themselves with a sign at the Park. What rules do other Municipalities use?
5. Who will maintain the Park. Your Support Group? The Parks department? The more you can find ways to limit the cost of the Park for the Municipality, the more they will be interested. There is never enough money to provide all the things that everybody wants.
6. Identify the Project Schedule. When do you want the Park to open? What does the Town need to do to make this happen? By-law changes? Approval of a budget. Availability of Town staff to prepare a site, install fencing etc.
Fantastic eh?
Over the past 15 years First Nations artists in Canada have taken to hip hop as a powerful storytelling method. First Nations hip hop is an incredible blend of traditional art forms, evocative imagery and raw and real exerpience relayed with a beat. It’s as if hip hop was built for indigenous expression – being story based, status informed, poetic and underscored with a heartbeat. I have a bunch of friends in this field including Skeena Reece, Jerrilynn Webster, Manik1derful, Rachel Oki, Wasaskwun Wuttunee and others.
Beat Nation was an exhibition of indigenous hip hop artists that closed in March 2010, but the site is still up and there is a great essay there from Tania Willard about the then current state of indigenous hip hop culture and one by Skeena Reece on hip hop in the indigenous context:
I think that a larger conversation needs to take place to really get to the root of what I am talking about here. We are now seeing on a grand scale, also due to the growing number of young Indigenous people coming of age, a massive documentation process and participation in mainstream culture. They are talking about their standards of living, their communities, their hopes and fears, and we need to listen. We need to open our eyes and really see what they are presenting and not just as a last resort to avoid any great catastrophes: we need to use it as a first resort for guidance in our roles as adults and guardians. Just as in any massive form of communication, there are going to be sentimental statements made, broad sweeping fears expressed and lots of ‘documentation’ to examine, but we should really consider ourselves lucky. Native youth, Native people, Indigenous people, hip hop people are presenting ideas, making connections, drawing conclusions and asking important questions. If we use this is as a basis of discussion, we can see that they’ve taken a lot of guesswork out of the equation and what we are left with is the essence of where they are at, exactly. As adults, educators, helpers, historians and just plain human beings we need to honour this subculture as much as we honour our own families. In doing this, we honour ourselves, our people and our humanity.
Just cool stuff.
Just read an article on how the fear of failure is the greatest thing holding back innovation in the business world. One reads these kinds of articles all the time. The essence is that unless we can let go of fear or deal with our deep need to be in control at all times, innovation is stifled.
This is true of course, but I see few articles that talk about how fear of failure in built into the architecture of the organization.
We live in an expert driven culture. Kids raised in schools are taught at an early age that having the answer is everything. Children raise their hands and are given points for the correct answer. Marks and scores are awarded for success – failure gets you remedial help, often crushing dreams and passions at the same time.
In the post-school world, most people are hired in a job interview based on the answers they give. There are millions of words written on how to give a stellar job interview, to land the job of your dreams. It is has to do with giving the right answers.
And so it is no surprise in the organizational world that I see success as the the only way forward and failure as “not an option.” For leaders, embracing failure is almost too risky. Despite the management literature to the contrary, I see very few leaders willing to take the risk that something may fail. Sometimes the failure is wrapped in competence – it’s okay to fail, but not to have losses. In other words, don’t do something I can’t repair.
This is because few of these articles talk about some of the real politiks of organizational life. It’s not that I’m afraid to fail – it’s that I am afraid to lose my job. When there is a scarcity of political capital and credit in an organization, there are multiple games that are played to turn failure into a way to screw the other guy so I don’t lose my job. Blame is deflected, responsibility is assigned elsewhere, and sometimes people will take credit for taking the risk but will lie the failure at the feet of someone else. It’s relatively easy to play on the expert driven culture to advance your own causes at the expense of another’s failings.
The answer to this is for leaders to be engaged in changing the architecture of fear and failure in the organization. It means hiring people into their areas of stretch, not into their areas of core competence. It means embodying risk taking, and creating and maintaining a culture of risk and trust. A single betrayal destroys the fabric of a risk taking team.
I think that means going beyond simply having corporate pep rallies to celebrate failure, or giving incentives for the “best failed idea.” It goes to creating a culture of conversation and collective ownership for successes and failures. It means standing with each other and not advancing your own interests at the expense of something that was tried. It means deeply investigating on an ongoing basis the ways in which we hold each other accountable so that we may work with grace and support, to rush in to help when things go sideways instead of lobbing accusations from the sidelines.
Without changing the architecture of fear, embracing the fear of failure is impossible.