When lions learn to read and write
My name is Carrina and for those of you who don’t know me — which is most of you — I am the Greater Manchester place lead for Lankelly Chase whilst the wonderful Habiba is off on parental leave.
Before Habiba left, we took the opportunity to establish a GM external team in the spirit of bringing alive and working through what it really means when a foundation looks at devolving decisions. We have been grappling with the incongruency of a collection of albeit well-meaning people in an office (when we could be in an office!) making decisions about people and places some hundreds of miles away from us. Instead, we all feel much more comfortable with the assumption that ‘people closest to a complex situation being free to use their initiative to engage and take responsibility for their own change.’ No doubt, we have a lot of stuff to offer and contribute, but we firmly believe that people in any area where they live and/or work both want to and know how to create and live in a thriving community.
From memory, I think it’s pretty much the first time that a group has formed locally where LC is still involved in decision making but are in the minority. It’s a heady mix of letting go of power and control, and I’m learning so much about me and my own practice in doing this. For a newly formed group, we go deep and broad, hold ourselves and each other to account, and have generative discussions about who is missing from our networks and how and what we want to do about this. We do this rigorously and compassionately.
I am wondering if one of the reasons that we have gone deep so quickly is because we spent the first 2–3 months getting to know each other. We value the act of conversation rather than separating out dialogue from the action — it’s a subtle but important distinction which we hear increasingly in our work. We also all have fairly clear roles and responsibilities as individuals and as a (temporary) team, and some processes like action inquiry, deep democracy and a learning framework to keep us on track and feeling safe yet heard.
Moreover, we’ve taken time to reflect on the system behaviours, which make up a core part of our approach to change at LC. The system behaviours have not come from us directly but from 100’s of conversations about the characteristics and qualities that make up a thriving and healthy community. They aren’t permanent and should be continuously reviewed, and no doubt others are missing. But for me and for now, they are super useful indicators that anchor me in the work. They help me to think about how I/we work and what to look out for when searching for that elusive shift in a system! (For more on the system behaviours)
In our second or third meeting together, we reflected on the question ‘which ones do we most connect with and why?’ In part to see if there is alignment and also to surface where we may have ‘blindspots’ and what we may need to pay attention to going forward as a group. I thought you might find it interesting to see them and also our reactions to them.
Clearly, there are a few which resonate and massive gaps in our connection with others. There’s no judgement here, just an observation and a note to keep an eye out if we want to keep them meaningful to us all. We also had a discussion more broadly about what is missing and where is the nuance — some examples included…
❏ Ethics — aren’t mentioned anywhere, and we wondered why?
❏ Context — all of the system behaviours need to be rooted in a local context.
❏ Understandable — are they explicit and coherent so that anyone who has a stake in a community can use them?
❏ Practice — they are all great in theory, but where is the evidence of the practice? Let’s give more practical examples of how they are showing up in reality.
❏ Resourceful — could this be interpreted as extractive and transactional?
❏ Is there permission to act not just equality of voice?
❏ Power — what does this really mean?
❏ Do or even can, all of them exist simultaneously?
❏ Perspective — if all the behaviours are nurtured here would the others naturally flow from them?
I am not sure I have any more straightforward ideas on most of these questions we raised even though time has passed, but they are thought-provoking, challenging and rooted in great conversation and communication. And for me, this is where the gold is — so perfectly summed up by Rose, quoting an old African proverb “Until the Lion Learns How to Write, Every Story will Glorify the Hunter.” But maybe the system behaviours at their simplest are tools to teach us how to write so all of us can tell our own stories.
I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on any of this because all stories and all views are important. :)
Carrina Gaffney
Twitter: @carrinag
