A little reflection today about social change and Occupy coming out of a conversation yesterday.
When I was a young man we talk about “movements” like we were on the go. From whatever place we were in we will move to another. And we marked this action with marches and demos, dancing and action. The feeling of action was powerful and palpable.
Once in a while we occupied a place and sat there for a while. But in general we were all about the movement. We made ourselves different from those we were working against and we moved.
Occupy did two things to change this, or at least introduce some new strategies. For one, they began by staying right where they were: occupying the place where you already are seems like not a very radical form of action, but fully occupying a space, living there, governing yourselves, creating services: that was somehow new, and over the past year I have thought about what it means to choose simply to be present and fully occupy your own space.
Second, the occupy movement in it’s declaration of “we are the 99%” played at a halfway gesture towards thinking about what social change looks like if you first have to build relationships with many who are your traditional “enemies.” The 99% contains a lot of people that you and I would rather not be associated with in any way. The choice was a conscious practice of seeing each other together. Occupy breaks down, as has always been the case, when difference drives people apart. If difference could drive people together, if we could practice handling difference with a container of relationship, then something new might be born.
And third, Occupy gave up the idea that any of us know exactly what changes are required in the world to make it better. Obviously there are strategies, tactics, policies and experiments that can be tried, but there are no answers. Refusing to publish demands is a key piece of this acknowledgment that a) the world is too complex to direct its evolution and b) any action that does not work with existing power in some way is easily crushed. Once demands are issued, the anti-Occupy narrative can be framed and the movement is marginalized and dissolved.
Occupy was, and continues to be, an experiment. It is not a new experiment but it is a recent iteration of an age old experiment to see what happens when we choose to stay where we are and deepen relationships. It continues to share learning, but for me these three practices of occupation, building a common container to hold difference and staying together in no knowing continue to echo in my own work and practice with groups trying to affect changes.
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My friend Bob Stilger writes today from the radiation fields of Fukushima where he has been joining people for the past year in the work of remaking lives after the tsunami and the meltdown. It’s worth heading over to his blog to follow his ongoing discoveries there, but here are some good bits from today’s posting:
People are learning how to co-exist, and more, with the radiation. One story I heard was about a town that wanted to have a festival with an outside play area for their children. Playing on the ground has become prohibited. They spent days and days cleaning one park so that it was radiation free – now, one morning – so the children could play. Tomorrow will be a different story. I thought of a learning center in south Texas that partnered with Berkana for a time – Llano Grande. When I visited there once I listened with interest as teachers organized a trip. One of the things they took into account in their planning was who was an illegal alien and who wasn’t. Special arrangements had to be made for the illegals. That was just the way it was. Others somewhere might be arguing about immigration policy, but at the community level you just work with what you have. So it is in Fukushima. You work with what you have.
My most amazing session of the day was in the town of Minamisoma. It was a community of 70,000 people. As the radiation settled more than 50,000 were forced to leave. Gradually people have been allowed to return and now the population is around 50,000. Part of Minamisoma is costal and there the tsunami damage has been untouched since 3.11 because of the radiation – it still looks exactly like the costal areas in Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures did in the weeks after 3.11. But people have returned because it is their home. They have returned to build something new together.
Early in 2012 some friends got together and decided to hold a future festival. More than 1000 people from the community participated. Music performances, presentations, dialogs – many different activities to engage people and invite them to think about their future together. At the end of the day one of the organizers, a woman who runs a local laundry offered a toast: before 3.11 we had a reputation for being quiet and just waiting for the government to do what they wanted. Now we know we must do it ourselves. We cannot wait for government. We must join hands and create a future together. And that’s what they are doing.
In June the opened a Future Center on a corner of a neighborhood. People started to use it immediately. Those who organized it said we don’t actually know what a Future Center is, but we know we need a place to create a future together – so we started.
The leadership circle is a delight – a truck driver, a laundress, a dairy farmer, a nurse’s aid, a bartender – ordinary people who have come together because something had to be done. One had been evacuated from Minamisoma to a town several hours to the north. It took her more than a year to be able to make her way home. Another spoke of how his family has been torn apart – he and his wife want to stay here, in their home with their children. His parents accuse him of killing his children and have moved north into Miyagi. He thinks they will never speak again. But these people have stepped forward because they must. This is home. There are dangers – but there are dangers everywhere and this is home.
They know this is long term work. One person spoke of how we hold individual future sessions and that is good. Things happen in them, but what we are really doing is working to gradually change the mindset of the community. We are helping ourselves realize that we can and will create a future together.
They are just ordinary people who are working together to create a life. With each other. Now.
Any person, any where in the world who promotes nuclear energy should be required to come and spend a week in Fukushima. They should be required to walk through Itakemura and experience its silent desolation. They should be required to talk with the parents who take days to make a playground radiation free for a few hours so their children can play outside again. They should be made to look at a future made invisible and then explain to people what they will do differently and how they will solve the problems of the soft underbelly of nuclear energy – dealing with the waste.
These people are strong. They will figure out how to live in a healthy and resilient way here in Fukushima. They will not be swayed by people who they think know what’s best for people who live here. It is their own future. They know they will make it together, working with what they have. They are amazing.
via Fukushima: Beyond Reacting –Bob Stilger’s Notes from Japan #36 ~ October 1st :: New Stories.
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Back in 1986 I was a young man who had grown up in an affluent neighbourhood in Toronto. I was unaware of the full story of my ancestry and although I was interested in the world, it was a pretty sheltered upbringing. I had just completed high school and had my eyes set on attending university to get a BA on my way to obtaining a Master of Divinity. I wanted to be a minister in the United Church of Canada.
As a result of my involvement with youth and social justice issues within the United Church, I was chosen to be one of several hundred Commissioners selected to attend the Church’s biannual policy and decision making gathering, the General Council. In 1986 the General Council was held in Sudbury Ont., and that year a significant and historical event took place: the Church made a formal apology to Aboriginal congregations for the role the Church played in the residential school system and in the devastating advance of colonization across the Canadian cultural landscape.
This was the first such apology in Canadian history between a non-native institution and indigenous peoples. It is perhaps not as well remembered that the indigenous representatives who were present deliberated with the Moderator of the Church for a long time before they announced that they were not accepting the apology but instead would release a ststement at a later date. That statement was two years in the making and in 1988 the response came: the Apology was still not accepted, but it was acknowledged and there was hope that it was sincere and at any rate, “We only ask of you to respect our Sacred Fire, the Creation, and to live in peaceful coexistence with us.” It was a call to alliance.
During the days of that General Council, I sat next to a Cree minister from Island Lake, Manitoba named Tom Little. At one point Tom turned to me and asked: “What will you do to make the apology real?” I made him a promise that, as I was going to Trent University a month later, I would supplement my history degree with courses from Trent’s highly acclaimed Native Studies program. Within months of arriving at Trent I knew my path had opened up. I dropped history and became a full Native Studies major. My life, work and spiritual path completely changed.
Canadians live in a space in between. We live within indigenous territories. We take pride in our connection to land, but suffer a terrible blind spot when it comes to knowing and understanding the deepest history, language and culture of the land. The zeal to recreate our lives – the zeal that all immigrants share – obscures what is already here. It deprives us of a rich world of thought and meaning that can only make us better humans if we open ourselves to it. If reconciliation is to be a real thing, it must be transformative for people and for the relationships that we share.
If you are a Canadian, now is the time to open yourself to what the invitation to reconcile really means. Who could we become as communities and as a country if we allow ourselves to be changed together rather than simply expecting one group of people to change and heal on their own? What can you do to be an ally?
It doesn’t have to be as life transforming for you as it was for me. But it could be.
UPDATE: Check out this booklet from Jennifer Ellis that documents a gathering around residential schools called UyidYnji Tl’äku: I Let it Go Now.
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One of the great pleasures of the weekend I just spent in San Francisco at the Applied Improv Network conference was hanging out with good friends, Caitlin Frost, Amanda Fenton (who is blogging up a storm these days), Viv McWaters and the inimitable Nancy White. While we were eating lunch one day, Nancy interviewed me on the subject of group sizes for a class she is teaching. Here is my off the cuff response:
If you want to see more thoughts on group sizes, I wrote a post on this a while back. See this as an invitation to practice and notice. No science was involved in the creation of these ideas!
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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.