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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
01 July 2016
Updated: 04 December 2020
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As I have sat amongst the other 2016 Clore Social Leadership Fellows one thing is for sure, I am not like anyone here. When I began my Fellowship journey, this state of affairs concerned me - we are all supposed to be people who want social change and want to learn how we can be more effective in leading these changes amongst the communities we work with and the social sector in general.
From several of the different tools we have used within the programme to understand our strengths, our styles of working and ‘areas of development’ (apparently we don’t call them weaknesses anymore), I found myself as an outlier. I was one of a handful of reflective thinkers in my learning. This means I like to hear many people’s views before making my mind up on an issue, I don’t like to be rushed into a judgement without having some good facts and it seemed to explain why I don’t particularly like telephone calls where I have to make instant decisions! But looking to the rest of my cohort I saw that the majority of the group were ‘activist learners’, people who want to get up and do things, lots of energy, lots of trying things and not worrying if they don’t work.
We also looked at another tool called the ‘Four Seasons Model’ - which is essentially a less complicated Myers Briggs type test - and I found myself within a smaller group of the ‘Summer’ category. For Summer people their drive, and what gets them up in the morning, is all about people and relationships. Summers generally like balance and harmony in teams, they dislike conflict and like consultative decision-making. Amongst the other Fellows there was a large bunch of ‘Springs’, people who are very creative and love to get new projects off the ground. There was also a good set of ‘Winters’, those who want to get things done who are efficient and take decisions quickly, and each of these seasons obviously have their strengths and weaknesses.
So as these things emerged, and I found myself and my experience to be very different from everyone else's, I had a medium-sized charity existential crisis. I thought to myself, ‘What on earth am I doing working in the charity sector?! I am so different, perhaps I don’t have the right qualities to do this big thing called ‘social change’, and am I failing the Armed Forces communities I work with because I am nothing like any of these other Fellows, Fellows who I admire and am inspired by, and should be more like!’
Yet as I’ve progressed through my Fellowship year, a new perspective is seeping in which has calmed my crisis. If I take nothing else from my time on the Clore Social Leadership programme I will take this: difference is beauty and difference is strength.
Most of my life I have been told to concentrate on the things I am not good at. No doubt this has helped me pass some exams I might have otherwise failed, however this norm has definitely been to the detriment of celebrating what it is that I can do. I have learnt over the Fellowship that ‘positive psychology’ (hear me out) would say to focus on the very things I am good at and to make them excellent. This is because the things we are not very good at we will likely only make mediocre if we try to improve them. Now this doesn’t mean I can just ignore the areas I am uncomfortable with. The lesson however is: understand where you excel, where you don’t and try to put a team around you that is VERY different to you who can fill in the strengths you don’t have.
As I stood on my own at the second residential with the other Fellows playing some active games, we were asked to stand along a scale of 0-5 on what we felt about risk taking. I stood at zero or perhaps 0.1 - the rest of the Fellows stood at least at 3 and many around 5. Previously this difference would have made me feel awful, but that day with the Fellows I felt very important because I realised that this difference could make me invaluable to a team where that trait is not present. It also impresses upon me that in my work life, I need to have people around me who are further up the risk taking scale - if we give ourselves the space to learn from each other, we will be able to pull each other up and down scale to achieve our collective goals.
It may seem like such a small change in perspective as to how I look at myself and others, but it has freed up my mind to embrace what I am good at and stop berating myself for the things I am not. The beauty of Clore Social Leadership is in the diversity of its Fellows. It is all their experiences and skills and life histories that matter. It is the strength found in the difference of where Fellows have worked or currently work, whether grassroots organisations, small and large charities, social enterprises and the private sector. Our difference is how we learn to be better, learn to ally with people that help us to step out of our comfort zones and who challenge us to do more exciting and impactful things for the communities we serve. As the Fellowship moves forward, and new Fellows look to apply for places in 2017, I urge Clore Social Leadership to continue to enable diversity and access to the Fellowship. I finally encourage potential applicants to embrace and bring their difference to the group, because this is the gold dust on which to build success.
Here's a short video of Marie-Louise describing what makes a good leader.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
13 June 2016
Updated: 04 December 2020
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I have to confess, I am a tree-hugger. Ever since I was a small child, looking up into a dizzying canopy of branches and leaves reaching to the sky has filled me with awe, and I often succumb to the urge to wrap my arms around the trunk, make a connection and, well, hug the tree.
So for me, the second Clore Social residential week at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham was a gift. Not only were the mature trees in full leaf, but there was an intoxicating array of plants and flowers, copses, hideaways, meandering paths around a serene lake – all inviting that same sense of connection and empathy with my surroundings, myself and my fellow Clore Social Fellows.
Over the course of the week, we questioned Clore Social, questioned each other, questioned society and the future of the social sector. We tried to listen, forgot to listen, became embroiled in our own individual anxieties associated with who was leading the group and why and where our place was within it. At one point, I engaged in somewhat exhaustive discussion with a facilitator about the definition of empathy itself: do we have to agree with the values and feelings of another, or is the key simply to acknowledge and respect the lens through which they experience the world – which may actually be very different to our own?
This discussion felt crucial to me because I sensed on some level, we were all negotiating the complexity on offer. I don’t think I was the only one to retreat somewhat bruised at times, wondering why I was here and what I could possibly offer. Neither do I think I was the only one who occasionally thought, deep down, that I have the answer, if only everyone would listen to me. Some of us were ready to go, leaping out of our chairs and practically out of the door in our bid to change things. Others of us sat quietly, immersed in our own internal dialogue, perhaps wondering whether to speak at all: did we have enough to say on behalf of the group, could we take our place in our own way or should we be more this, or less that? And what experiences had brought us here – did they include education, privilege and entitlement or trauma, poverty and marginalisation: how much was any combination of these influencing our ability to engage properly with others?
Our struggle at times to seek out, respect and harness different lenses within the group seemed to mirror a wider considerations within the social sector – whose voice get listened to, who gets the (dwindling) money and what about those who have neither the voice nor money to convince us that their needs and their cause are important?
Never has it been more imperative that we are able to think and behave tactically, influence funders, purchasers and policy makers, sometimes using our empathy for perhaps more Machiavellian purposes. Equally, never has it seemed wiser to engage our empathy in adaptive leadership, able to bring our organisations and beneficiaries with us as we negotiate ever more choppy seas. Against my collectivist, tree-hugging nature, I could see how, as individuals, we need to be able to stand up to these challenges regardless of our individual drivers, play the game on behalf of those less powerful than us and, dare I say it, take the lead.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
10 May 2016
Updated: 04 December 2020
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Jean Demars is a 2015 Fellow and former Housing Lead at Praxis Community Projects. Jean is interested in the nature of complex change within various systems.
Notre-Dame-des-Landes is a small village in a bocage and wetland area, situated 20 miles North of Nantes (France). Wetlands are considered the most biologically diverse of all ecosystems, serving as home to a wide range of plant and animal life.
Notre-Dame-des-Landes has been the site of a struggle between the French state, who decided to build an international airport on the land; Vinci, the largest construction company in the world who obtained concession for the development of the site in 2010; and the local population, who try and protect the land on which they have been living for generations.
Since 2009 it became the site of the first ‘Zone à Defendre’ (ZAD) when the local population invited people to occupy and repopulate the area which had been partly bought through compulsory purchase orders. Occupant-squatters came from radical[1] environmental movements and anti-capitalist struggles to live in the area and link up with the 50+ local groups fighting against the airport and its developers.
Commune for the 21st Century
In contrast to most social movements, which funnel difference and diversity into a unified whole, the ZAD cannot be simplified. For some, it is a local struggle against the building of an airport, whilst others see it as a concrete example of capitalist expansion and environmental destruction. Both these strands still believe in the legitimacy of democratic institutions, considering reform and more democracy to be the response.
Those most committed to social transformation go further in expressing that it is also ‘to defend the possibility of sharing a common future on this bocage’[2]. In order to create and maintain new social relations, another struggle is necessary, this time, against that which is embedded deep within us.
‘The autonomy that is being experimented in the bocage can’t be reduced to our food and material elements. We are not interested in self sufficiency for itself. What is happening here is political autonomy. What we are inventing, through trial and error, is the capacity to collectively decide our own rules.’ [3]
This typifies the depth of the social transformation at stake in the making of the ZAD. It should not be interpreted as some form of self-management, so prevalent in advanced capitalism, but rather as an exploration in modes of being and interacting that break with the imperatives of the market.
Tactics for Social Change
Legal proceedings against the French state have been going on for 15 years with the support of committed lawyers, expert economists and ecologists. Despite irrefutable proof of the damage the airport would cause, and despite the possibility of expanding the existing airport, the law continues to rule in favour of the state.
Outside the legal process, the primary form of resistance is expressed through regular protest marches, demanding the termination of the project. Similarly, some elements of the movement have engaged with existing political parties to access the higher echelons of power and attempt to influence the process and outcome.
Direct action has been an important element of resistance. When evicted by riot police in 2012, occupant-squatters resisted the destruction of farm buildings and refused to leave the area. The local community supported them and organised a re-building event that brought together 40,000 people. Following this, attacks were launched against machinery attempting to enter the ZAD along with acts of sabotage to ensure no preliminary works could be carried out.
Direct Action doesn't stop at self-defence. It has brought together the various elements of the ZAD via environmentalists recording protected species in the area, local farmers sharing knowledge and lending cattle to start a cheese-making workshop, the exchange of seeds, the weekly non-market where produce is exchanged and ‘sold’ for what can be afforded. The list is endless because it continues to be created in the everyday interactions of people inhabiting or engaging in the ZAD, without any external, superior or hegemonic body to arbitrate or intervene.
What lessons can be learnt from the ZAD for ethical leadership?
- Strong ethical principles guiding an experimental daily practice is key to the transformation of social relations.
- The importance of negating what exists as much as creating the new. Negation is a necessary but insufficient condition for the creation of the new. Trying to build participatory communities without first rejecting the current social order will sooner or later bring it against the existing order, whether that is in the form of eviction or recuperation.
- Dispersing power has to be a key feature of the new so that autonomous communities remain non-hierarchical. One consequence of this may be that mass movements are not desirable to build, unless they are the result of individual actions.
The ZAD is a community of struggle in becoming. Its inherent ‘messiness’ is its strength if only those involved don't see ‘difference’ as inhibiting, but the engine of the movement, the affect unleashed on its outside and the potential it can actualise in the everyday. As such the exchanges between local people fighting the building of an airport, and occupant-squatters building a commune for the 21st century are key, even though they could just as easily be exploited by the state to split the movement.
What makes this struggle so important is that it contains the world, old and new, within it and provides a concrete pressure point for people to get engaged in, far away from depoliticised community organising or abstract, even if radical, ideology.
Footnotes:
[0]: Crested Newt is a protected species found in the local area, which has been taken as a symbol for all species that will disappear as a direct result of the armed concrete poured over the wetlands to build the airport.
[1] : The use of the word ‘radical’ need to be reviewed in the current political context where states have been so radical in the imposition of inhumane policies. It is used here in the conventional sense of those seeking transformation rather than reform.
[2] : Defending the ZAD, Mauvaise Troupe Collective, p. 22, éditions de l’éclat.
[3]: Ibid, p.20
[4] : Ibid, p. 20
Further Reading
http://zad.nadir.org/
https://www.acipa-ndl.fr/
Defending the ZAD: A new little book about the struggle against an airport and its world.
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