A braided river delta in Alaska, image courtesy of NOAA
Not as the be-all and end-all of their organizations and teams, but a good leader will hold a container in the workplace in which disagreement is productive, generative and honouring of different perspectives. The best leaders will also hold coherence.
I’ve often said that organizations need to be a bit like rivers, in that there is a coherent direction of flow but many back eddies. If you think about the way a large river travels through an estuary, it creates side channels and cuts of corners and bends while still channeling across the land. Life lives in these eddies and its even possible to productively travel in the opposite direction from the river flow efficiently using these back eddies. Organizationally speaking, sometimes you need to retreat from a well established course of action, and having disagreement and dissent within the organization can sometimes show you the path back to another way of doing things.
Peter Levine and Dayna L. Cunningham have a link-rich piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review today that discusses this, and its implications for civil society beyond just organizational or movement-based settings. The final paragraphs are good:
Leaders must attend to two related responsibilities. Internally, they must protect and encourage voice by clarifying decision rules, distinguishing disagreement from disloyalty, and building routines that prevent conflict from hardening into factionalism. Externally, they must establish clear guardrails for responding to dissenting public voices, including those from activists, shareholders, elected officials, and the media. When organizations become the object of public disagreement, the question is not whether pressure will arise, but whether their principles are strong enough to guide their response.
Clear commitments, embedded in durable practices and governance structures, help prevent reactive shifts driven by momentary outrage or market fluctuation. They allow organizations to absorb criticism, weigh competing claims, and respond without abandoning core values. In doing so, institutions do more than manage disagreement; they demonstrate how pluralistic societies can remain steady amid strain.
Organizations that invest in the structures and norms that make disagreement constructive—both internally and in response to external scrutiny—help sustain the civic habits on which democratic life depends. In an era of polarized public discourse, institutions that learn to govern both expression and response become quiet stabilizers of the democratic order.
If we cannot practice disagreement in places where we also have an incentive to collaborate together, we will be hard pressed to do it in the looser fields of community and broader society. And that enables those who would like us divided to use disagreement to generate separation.
My friend Peter Frinton, a long time Islander, and former Councillor, sent along an email the other week with his thoughts on the current Bowen Island Official Community Plan process. In it he included a link to an old landscape analysis by H.E. Hirvonen completed 50 years ago which the author described nine types of landscape and looked at the coastline and major watersheds of the Island. It makes for fascinating reading. Technical, well researched observations accompanied by informed opinions about the development and logging potential of different land types.
This document predates much of the explosive growth on our island that began in the 1990s and accelerated once we became a municipality in 1999. At that time, planning moved from the islands Trust to our own municipality and although we are still guided by the Islands Trust mandate and restrictions, it's fair to say that our development trajectory has mirrored much of the regional pressures and growth.
But you can't change what was put here in the first place. Tectonic forces, volcanic activity, glaciers, rain, wind, and tide shaped this island. We have to live within these constraints.
The Eternal Flame at the King Centre in Atlanta which I visited in 2013
I was born in Toronto two months after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The US civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s were as distant to me as was apartheid in South Africa or the Vietnam War. Even as I grew up through my first 16 years, the heightened social justice actions and liberations struggles of the 1960s were mere whispers across time and borders. Neither the Globe and Mail or the Star, the CBC or CTV, offered us much in terms of what was really happening in the world. No internet. No videos. No social media.
On October 20, 1984 I participated in a huge anti-nuclear march in Toronto and that day met dozens of people who handed me pamphlets, bent my ears to their causes and opened my eyes to what was happening in the world from Kurdistan to South Africa, to the revolutions in Nicaragua and the resistance in El Salvador, and to issues at home, the recognition of Aboriginal rights, the pursuit of justice and equality for women and queer folks and people of colour. It was a carnival of struggle and hope.
A few weeks later the US held an election in which Ronald Regan won a second term. Jesse Jackson ran in that election, for the Democratic Party nomination, but it was Walter Mondale and Gearldine Ferraro who were on the opposite ticket. Nevertheless, Jesse Jackson had become a voice for the continued struggle for civil rights, turning his prophetic attention to the damage that Reaganomics was already starting to do in the world, decades before that economic philosophy had been debunked. (Even today, after 45 years of wealth inequality and economic violence, people seem to believe that trickle down economics is still worth a go – “cut those taxes!” they say, plunging us further into despair).
Jesse Jackson was my generation’s Martin Luther King Jr. His era as THE public face of civil rights and racial justice has been over for some time, due in part to his illness, but also due to the new faces of the struggle that have emerged in this century, speaking to and meeting this century’s challenges and needs. Nevertheless, reading of his passing today sent me to a state of nostalgic gratitude for how his work and voice and presence brought the spirit of Martin Luther King to a new generation of social change activists like me. We could see and hear him speak. We could catch the cadence of his voice and the relevance of his message to the times we were living in. When you heard him speak, you could look around yourself and confirm the truth of his observations, and take inspiration from his calls to action and his “perfect mission.”
I liked this obituary from the Guardian this morning. It contains some quotes that resonate.
“My leadership skills came from the athletic arena,” Jackson told the Washington Post in 1984. “In many ways, they were developed from playing quarterback. Assessing defenses; motivating your own team. When the game starts, you use what you’ve got – and don’t cry about what you don’t have. You run to your strength. You also practice to win.”
You work with what you have, and you play the field in front of you.
“The arc of the moral universe is long and it bends towards justice, but you have to pull it to bend. It doesn’t bend automatically. Dr King used to remind us that every time the movement has a tailwind and goes forward, there are headwinds…[in these times] he would have said: ‘We must not surrender our spirits. We must use [these times] not to surrender but fortify our faith and fight back.’”
I think that teaching is the one for our times, one for all of us, and one for the legacy that Jackson, King and others have delivered to us all along the long arc of the moral universe.
Rest in power.
There is a very weird thing happening Canada right now. If you spend any time on the algorithm driven social media and you live especially in western Canada you will have noticed that there is a tremendous amount of out of proportion outrage being generated around issues like “western separatism” and residential school denilaism.
It’s the reason I left Facebook and Twitter permanently. What was coming through my feed was pure poison. It is poison for democratic deliberation, it is poison for community cohesiveness and it is undermining governance and it is harming people.
And it’s serving someone, driven by a clear agenda which seeks to reduce government regulation, and do the bidding of large foreign corporations and investors. This isn’t new, but the capture of social media algorithms by these companies and their strategic initiatives are driving our communities and countries apart. RAPIDLY.
Craig Turner has a great piece on this and it’s worth a read if you want to get a grip on reality.
Ted Gioia remembers his first ever jazz show, seeing Yusef Lateef in LA. It changed his life.
17 seconds into the performance by the Yusef Lateef Quartet. I honestly wanted to jump up, and tell everybody in the nightclub:
This is the moment I’ve been waiting for.
I knew in that instant that everything in my life had been leading up to this. And I’d been wasting my time with rock and pop and classical music. My destiny was jazz.
I had a similar experience with jazz. It was perhaps 1986 in Toronto and my friend Winston Smith, who worked at my local bookstore, Writers & Co. Invited me to go see Mal Waldron and Steve Lacy at The Rivoli on Queen Street. Winston fed me a steady diet of novels and poetry by African American writers like John Edgar Wideman and Nathanial Mackey and he turned my head when it came to music. And while the records he leant me were one thing seeing two master improvisers at work live was another thing altogether.
Waldron and Lacy were a phenomenal duet. Together they spanned the history of the genre. Waldron was one of Billie Holiday’s accompanists and Lacy played with the likes of Cecil Taylor. Their set was full of Monk tunes and original compositions that strayed wildly from the head as they entered into free music together. It was my introduction to this kind of jazz.
Unlike Gioia this performance didn’t make me want to play the music. I found it raw and intimidating and had no way in with the limited guitar technique I had. There were no guitar players making this music other than Sonny Sharrock and so what it did was light a fire in me for this music and art that approached this kind of intensity and thoughtfulness.
Life changing.
Go read this amazing blog post about these two musicians and their long history together.