Working with groups is not easy. This is Ian McGeechan, manager of the British and Irish Lions before a dead rubber test.
My friend Kathy Jourdain was quoted yesterday as saying “our power comes from our vulnerability.” This video reminds me of how that feels some days.
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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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Heard a great story today.
I’m at a conference of union activists who are working to build their activist muscles up and do work in communities. One of the presenters here is Jason Sidener, who I’ve enjoyed spending a couple of hours with. Jason is the Member Mobilization Coordinator for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). he is abased in Madison, Wisconsin and played a key organizing role in the upheavals there in 2011 when public sector unions successfully stood up to Governer Scott Walker’s anti union agenda.
Jason told a story today about some of the work he did long before that high profile action. He was brought up on a farm, a conservative rural young man who was raised Republican and came from a Republican family. He changed as he grew up, and when he started working for the union he discovered that in the AFSCME about a third of the members are Republicans. They like their guns, they are social conservatives and they don’t trust outsiders.
Jason noticed that at union meetings and conventions, these conservatives, who nevertheless were supporters of fair wages and benefits for public sector workers, often found themselves silenced, ostracized and marginalized. The temptation is to argue with conservative union members and try to convince them that their politics are wrong. But Jason took another approach. He saw that the split between conservative and progressive members was dangerous to the unity of the union, so he set about creating a Conservative caucus within the union, where Conservative members could have a safe place to discuss their ideas.
Although counter intuitive, this initiative paid dividends when Republican Scott Walker tried to pass his radical legislation last year. Many of the members of the Conservative caucus started coming to Jason saying “take me off that list.” They were realizing that the guy they had elected was no friend of theirs after all. They appreciated the Conservative caucus but saw that in this case, the bigger movement was more important.
I was struck by Jason’s unfettered approach to this work. His confidence in the right thing to do, his commitment to inclusion and his presence of mind to care for the bigger movement is inspiring.
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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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I was listening to a brilliant interview with the theologian and scholar Walter Bruggeman this morning. He was talking about “the prophetic imagination” and using the poetry of the Old Testament prophets to make a point about a key capacity that is missing in the world right now: the ability to deal with disruption.
SImply, disruption is what happens when the plans we thought we had have suddenly changed. It could be a major economic collapse – a black swan event – or something so small as your bus left early. How we respond to disruption is a key capacity for individual resourcefulness, and how we collectively deal with disruption is a key capacity for resilience.
It is interesting, as Bruggeman notes, that our frame for understanding the future is basically consumerist. We purchase certainty. It’s as if we invest in the present because it guarantees a given performance of the future. When we buy something, we expect to receive quality and a guarantee that if it doesn’t work according to plan, we can hold someone else responsible.
That understanding about the way the future is supposed to roll out infects everything we do. When events overtake our assumptions about the future, we look for someone to blame, someone to be accountable, someone to make it right. I can find all kinds of ways in which I expect people to OWE me something. It’s as if our participation in the social contract guarantees that our expectations will be met.
But they never are. We cannot all live in our ideal worlds. Diversity and complexity means disruption.
The greatest challenge of our time I think, both individually and collectively, is how to equip ourselves for disruption. There are many patterns that scale across dimensions of practice, and a few key ones may be:
- Self-awareness. Knowing your own response to disruption is helpful. Do you get stressed by unexpected change? Do you take it in stride? Does your community shake and shudder with fits and paroxysms or do you just give up? All of these reactions are common and they are interesting. And they are not anyone’s fault or anyone else’s responsibility but your own. Learning to be resourceful with disruption begins by knowing how you deal with it.
- Stop. When events overtake you it is wise to stop. The worst thing to do is to continue to pursue the course of action you initiated before the disruption occurred. As an individual, stopping is easier than doing it as a collective. It often takes a loud voice to get a group intent on achievement to stop what it is doing, so being prepared to stop means paying attention to the small voices – the ones inside yourself and the ones inside your team.
- Look for surprise. One of the basic operating principles of Open Space Technology is “Be Prepared to Be Surprised.” My friend Brian Bainbridge lived this principle, even from within the relative security and certainty of his life as a Catholic priest. As a result he welcomed surprise with delight. Looking for and preparing for surprises isn’t just a good self-help trick though. It’s excellent planning. And because by definition, you can never know what will surprise you, the best way to prepare for surprise is to train your outlook to work with it rather than against it. Lots of energy is spent beating back the results of surprise. We would do better to be able to see it’s utility and work with it.
- Welcome and engage the stranger. There is a Rumi poem called “The Guest House” I love that has these lines in it: “This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival”Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows who sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honourably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight.” the stranger contains the answer. When disruption occurs, it is like a door opening through which floods unfamiliarity. That all comes with strangers and many of those strangers hold the answers to what to do next, but you have to take the time to engage with them. And never discount the stranger among you, the person you thought you knew that suddenly becomes a different in the midst of a crises.
- Choose wisely. Meeting the chaos of disruption with the order of stillness helps to create the space for wisdom. Not having stillness means one gets caught up in the rush and tumble of chaotic disruption and one reacts instead of acting wisely. Becoming still and then stopping has similar results. Balancing chaos and order gives us the time and space to make a wise decision. The opinions of others help here. If you are alone when your life is disrupted, you might not have the breadth of understanding to make a wise decision. You may end up travelling in a direction that takes you away from where you need to go. When you make a choice, choose wisely.
- Commit. Finally commit fully to your next move. This is principle that is alive in the field of improvisational theatre. The scene takes a surprising twist and as an actor you have two choices: hang on to the story you were previously developing or let the new story line change you. You can tell an improviser that only half commits to the new story. They become immediately stuck in a space that is too constrained to move. They are wanting to work with the new but unwilling to abandon the old. When disruption occurs it is already too late not to be changed by it. So commit fully to the new world so that you can be a full participant in it.