Last week we ran a webinar called ‘the inner work needed to change systems’, over Zoom. I read through the chat box after the session. It was honestly a very emotional experience to see, in real time, the energy shifts and connections being made in the room.
So first, thank you to everyone who responded so vulnerably, so appreciatively, to the stories we shared. I am also incredibly grateful to everyone who offered reflections, resources, and insights – there are all these puzzle pieces I’ve been holding and staring at on this subject for some time now, unable to click them into place until now, until the collective perspectives and shared experiences in the room came together to reflect with me.
In the session I shared the metaphor of the elephant and the rider, suggesting that we must tend to our elephants (the emotional side of us) rather than pretending that the rider (our rational side) is always in control – and one person asked in response: ‘How do we tend to our elephants and model how the herd supports its members, and itself the collective?’
Here are my thoughts.
Value Relationship-building
I talked in the session about Andy and I working together in a previous workplace, where folk thought it was outright weird that he put so much time into simply building relationships. Meetings are supposed to have tangible outputs, don’t you know? Time at work shouldn’t be wasted on simply getting to know and understand one another!
But one of the core ideas about doing inner work as a pathway to changing systems is that we need those strong, deep relationships in our work because inner work is a collective action, not an individual one.
As one attendee reflected in the session: ‘building relationships is not considered work and yet we can’t do work without them - what a crazy world!’ and another said ‘People are craving relational work, relational engagement. The systems world is built on transactional everything. The friction is immense.’ If we cannot create the space to build relationships, if we de-prioritise them, then we are not creating the space needed to let inner work truly happen.
Ask for Support
Andy spoke about the radical power of asking for support, and how difficult it can be. The relationships we build are there to hold us as well as to challenge us. Some of our deep inner work, or the situations where we are jolted into a new inner work journey, come at times of great lows.
The spaces that we create for inner work, therefore, have to have open arms to those around us, but it can take some bravery to step into those arms, to trust that the people around us can hold us in the ways we need.
If we instead withdraw, as society often teaches us to do (after all we’re supposed to ‘leave our personal life at the door’ in professional settings), then we are more likely to put on that professional armour and miss the opportunity to actually ‘tend to our elephants’.
Another person shared the reflection in the session that there are some ‘socially acceptable’ times to ask for support, for example in the wake of a bereavement, but that other times are (by corollary) not socially acceptable. However, there are all kinds of events in work, as in life, that require us to reach for support.
I enjoyed one of our attendees sharing this practice of ‘conscious complaining’ – an excellent idea for starting to normalise the sharing of problems, no matter how small they seem.
Build Belonging
For this phrase I have to give credit to Brian Stout (whose work I made reference to in the session but hadn’t actually fully connected to my inner work thinking). The ‘herd’ can help us tend to our inner elephants by creating spaces where we feel we belong.
I’d spoken about the need for exercising curiosity about our own behaviours and others’; it is very hard to exercise that curiosity when we don’t feel that we belong in a space. Over email, Brian shared with me the idea that ‘when people give up on the possibility of belonging, instead they reach for power’ as a way of reclaiming agency.
In this way, when we find ourselves experiencing places where we (or others) don’t feel a sense of belonging, we’re more likely to experience either power disputes or, I would add, lethargy (or a combination of the two from different people). This creates a catch 22 – the environment itself is not healthy enough for inner work to take place, but often the only way to provide a better environment is through inner work.
So, we need to think very carefully about what people need in order to feel that they belong to a space and to continuously nurture that – to consciously build a healthy, supportive, inclusive culture.
Create Psychological Safety and Build Trust
When we ran this session in Oxford earlier this year, someone offered a challenge about inner work through a racial equity lens; that it is extremely difficult to challenge someone else’s problematic behaviours when they may then paint you as ‘the troublesome brown person’. I absolutely cannot speak from this perspective with any kind of authority – as a white person it’s not mine to claim.
My reflection here is that psychological safety is absolutely paramount to inner work. We have to be confident that the challenges we give to one another will be received in good faith, rather than with defensiveness or aggression. If we want to create organisations or networks that work to create the conditions for inner work, we have to focus first on creating psychological safety (and no this doesn’t mean just saying ‘this is a safe space’).
This means doing so with real attention to the structural inequalities that make some spaces less psychologically safe for some people than others. Spaces cannot be psychologically safe if we can’t trust the people we’re sharing with. So, a significant part of building psychologically safety is building trust between people – and being curious about what might stop people from trusting us.
Facilitate Bravery
This is something we talk about a lot at the Collective Impact Agency – we have a whole piece of work (with fractals co-op) called the Facilitating Bravery Initiative. But facilitating bravery isn’t just a project, it is everywhere in our work.
Systems change work fundamentally requires bravery – the courage to disrupt the broken systems that we currently live in. Inner work also requires bravery – the courage to face up to the ways in which we have internalised those systems, and the courage to put down our ‘professional armour’ and work on it with others. As one attendee said, ‘if it feels hard, it’s because it is, but it’s not impossible.’ Someone later said ‘The professional armour is also locking us into thicker and thicker personal armour too…Disconnection from ourselves’ which was neatly followed up by another person with ‘It is this disconnection with ourselves that is traumatic.'
When we talk about ‘facilitating bravery’ at CIA we are talking about something collective. It takes a lot for a group of people to be able to take big risks together, but often that is particularly and precisely because we have internalised the old damaging systems in different ways.
It’s a lot of work for every person to understand what old-system behaviours (/processes/practices) are unhealthy and take the risk of changing them – and we often need to externalise things, or to receive external perspectives to support this process.
Putting down your ‘professional work armour’ is a prime example of this. It can be jarring for some people to see a male leader crying at work, it can lead to a loss of confidence in that leader or to seeing them as ‘unprofessional’ or ‘weak’ – because the trope of the ‘infallible male leader’ does not include displays of emotion that show vulnerability.
But by acknowledging that our male leader is human, in discouraging the suppression of emotion in men (that society’s patriarchal structures encourage), we give everyone the space to be their whole, elephant-plus-rider, selves – regardless of power or status. Until the whole group does the work to recognise why the sight of a man showing sadness in a workplace is unsettling (or feels so hard for the men in the group to do), they cannot create an environment where it feels safe for everyone to do so – a space where inner work can happen freely.
This takes a guided and deliberate, carefully facilitated, process of group reflection as well as individual reflection.
I’m outlining all these ideas at a painfully high level here – this connecting is live and my thinking will inevitably evolve. I hope this indicates some of the ways in which it’s evolving here and now, with thanks to all the people who have helped with – and are helping with – this.
I’d love this to grow. As one person said ‘We need to normalize these types of conversations in [the] workplace and also [our] personal lives. The more people who dare to be vulnerable…that's the seed of change’.
I couldn’t have put it better.
If you’d like to continue this conversation please do reach out or exchange letters with Andy, Lara and I through our ‘letters to friends’ email community, we’d love to continue growing alongside you!
Comments