We present a short summary of one of the “NewStories” interventions at the last meeting of the USG (Unione Superiori generali), 25 - 27 November 2020, online, on the topic: “A New Imagination of the ‘Possible’: leadership in times of Post-Covid-19”. Some meetings were led by people from Newstories.org: Bob Stilger (and Zanette Johnson and Zulma Patarroyo). «Our work at NewStories has always been to help people change the story so we can change what is possible. We recognize that this pandemic is part of the web of other disasters – climate, social, economic – demanding that we change the way we live on our small planet».
- NewStories is honored to be with you today.
Over the next 3 hours, my colleagues and I will share with you what we think it means to offer leadership in these times. We will invite you into dialogue with each other as we explore a post COVID world where new challenges are added to the familiar – climate catastrophes, poverty, mass immigrations, gender and generational changes and pervasive confusion about what it means to be alive today. We know this may be the first time for some of you to engage deeply in virtual space. Trust me just a little bit when I tell you we will have fun here and that the time will fly by. I assure you can’t break anything! … We’ll be asking you to dialogue with each other in a small group around questions that matter.
- Let me take this in further by sharing a bit of my own story.
I grew up in a working-class family in Portland Oregon. I still live in the Pacific Northwest of the US, in the town of Spokane, Washington. After coming to Spokane in 1974, I co-founded and led one of the first multi-purpose community development corporations in the Northwest. We worked in deeply collaborative ways, engaging citizens to recommend solutions to their most pressing problems. Even as we were acknowledged for doing excellent work, I knew it was not enough. People kept having more problems and needed more help!
As this century began, I completed my PhD in “Learning and Change in Human Systems” by working with people and communities in the Global South – India, Pakistan, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Brazil and Mexico. What I learned with them was that it was time for new stories about how to build heathy and resilient communities. I watched as grassroots leaders engaged people in imagining what might be possible, and then worked with them as a community to create what they imagined. Their focus was not on problems. It was on using what they had to create new possibilities.
In 2010 I was invited to bring this work into Japan, a country and culture of my heart since my student days in the early 70s. That work led to six years of work with people and communities in Japan after the Triple Disasters of March 11, 2011 when a 9.0 Earthquake was followed by a tsunami that reached 20 meters high and caused the nuclear reactors at Fukushima to explode.
Two weeks after the disasters I was in Tokyo leading a meeting in the business community. No one wanted to be there. The air was heavy as they arrived. None had managed to talk to anyone – let along themselves – about what had happened in Japan. Three hours later, the room was filled with excitement. The change was so complete that I had to step to the side, quite myself, and ask what’s just happened here? In my silence the voice of God spoke this into my heart:
We have been released from a future we did not want!
Beyond the devastation and the death of disasters is a point of release. Our allegiance to old patterns and ways of thinking is often shattered. We see things we were unable to see before. We ask questions to ourselves and those around us about how we want to live. It is a potent time.
And it is the time we live in now. COVID has been devastating. It piled on top of a world that was already in disarray. A new way, a time of new relationship with each other and our planet is emerging. It is a time which calls for new kinds of leadership which helps people connect to their hearts, minds, hands and spirits. It is a leadership of inquiry and of presence and it pays attention to 3 levels of system:
- This is the leadership which invites us all to look clearly at the world around us, at its beauty and at its blight. To look at it with appreciation and with awe. To envision what is possible. And to ask, what needs to be done, now?
- It is leadership which asks us to notice where we stand and who we stand with. It asks us to discover the power of staying together to create what we want in communities that care.
- It is leadership which invites everyone to be aware of their gifts and potential and to ask what is mine to do?
At NewStories we think of this as Life Affirming Leadership. I wrote about this in one of the excerpts you received from my book, AfterNow. We believe that every community is filled with leaders. When we connect them with each other, convene them around questions that matter, and illuminate the work they undertake, we create the possibility of transformative change.
Simple principles give birth to Life Affirming Leadership:
- Every community is filled with leaders
- Whatever the problem, community has the answers
- Magic happens when we encounter each other with respect, curiosity and generosity
- Self-reliance and Interdependence work together
- We must live the world we want, today
- We don’t have to wait for external help. We have many resources with which to begin
- We walk at the pace of the slowest
- We find a clear sense of direction and take an elegant, minimum step forward
- We proceed one step at a time, making the path by walking it
- Local work when connected across communities leads to transformative change.
- We want to go one step further and share how we see the world around us at NewStories.
I was born in 1949. The story that I grew up in was that if I studied hard, I would get a good job, marry a good wife, make more money than my parents, buy all sorts of cool things and be happy.
In the US there was a popular television story – Ozzie and Harriett – that told this story. I embraced this story in my teens – never really questioned it. Others grew up knowing this was not their story – but it that was what was supposed to be the right story, and one they would be likely never to have.
By the time I was 20 years old, the civil rights movement and its demand for racial justice and equity was in full swing, protests of the Vietnam War had erupted, women were beginning to loudly demand equality, and we were starting to understand that we were treating our environment poorly – and that there would be consequences.
We were also progressing in leaps and bounds. Technology was making incredible things possible, we were learning more and more about how people imagine, think and learn, we were understanding more about each other and the universe in which we live.
By the eighties, a good friend of mine had proclaimed: things are getting better and better, worse and worse, faster and faster. And that was more than 30 years ago!
We are in VUCA times – volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous. The old story from the middle of the last century – the story of my childhood -- about what made for a good life never was true for many people. And it is true for even fewer today.
Most of us here today know we need a new story about how to live into our future – even while we are still dependent on things the old story created – schools, hospitals, infrastructure, systems of governance and more.
Something is dying. Something is being born.
Some fight to retain privileges they believe are rightfully theirs. Others stand up and demand that they too deserve a chance at a better life. The tensions between these different stories are intensified by disasters, collapse and upheaval that surrounds us. Those tensions are not going away. They are intensifying.
- COVID-19 has changed life on this planet for the short term and the long term as well. As we emerge from this darkness, much will be different.
- Climate catastrophes will continue death and destruction and will force more migrations.
- Struggles for political power and dominance will cause more wars.
- People marginalized and living in poverty will keep standing up to demand better lives.
- Anger and grief and confusion about all these changes will continue to lead to polarization and violence.
At the same time, within and beyond these tensions, a new world is being born.
- We are remembering and reweaving the social fabric of communities as the foundation for prosperity.
- We are reimaging our relationship to food and healthy eating, sticking our hands in the dirt and recalling our relationship to earth.
- We are beginning to build new housing in intimate, connected community where we live well with less energy and smaller carbon footprints.
- We are understanding that waste is our most abundant and valuable resource and learning new uses.
- We are reimagining how to learn and work and play.
ALL of this is going on at the same time and it is often confusing!
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