Art or lifeboats?

I plunged myself into working across the education, food, technology, biotech, organisational and governance sectors after exiting a path that had already been paved out for me in academic science. 

I left academic science to find the others — those who were committed to doing something as I watched the Earth burn. I was sitting in one of the world’s top biofuel labs and literally thinking to myself, I’m sitting here and watching the world burn. After a stint in climate activism and the fossil fuel divestment movement and realising that was pretty much pointless, I left.

I set out with enough energy to fuel full time self-directed research into the alternative options available to change the economic system, unwind climate change, stop ecological destruction, champion new forms of education, save lives, teach and design a master’s course, run a farming and land project, begin consulting, testing ideas through workshops, and have countless conversations with others who were signposted as ‘changemakers’.

In the process, something in me has died a little bit. I miss the analytic and rational approach from my days in the laboratory. In the world of “changemakers” I have seen so much work being fuelled by fantasy ideology and a sort of totally delusional psychological denial about the possibility of what is going to work, on what scale, and for whom. I think I have witnessed the birth (or growth, or rebirth) of a kind of new spiritual bypass — a form of spiritual belief which lets us feel good about doing work/projects that feel and look good, but don’t do good.

I don’t see any good strategy based on reality in the world of people trying to change the world for the better. It’s like some kind of forcefield that stops larger collaboration, strategic thinking and the kind of sanity and rationality displayed in science and business. The sector is clouded by a kind of blind panic and over-exuberance but in the wrong direction. Eventually the energy sort of breaks and gives out, and people collapse back onto paths like child rearing, following a trodden path, becoming a company consultant, these sorts of things.

There also seems to be a strange resistance to large scale, true collaboration. Like, the sort of collaboration that happens in armies, or huge global corporations. Everyone is just sort of competing with each other, sure that their slightly different version of changemaking ambitions is just that little bit better and they’re really going to make it and truly save the day. Capitalism has an edge: in capitalism, no-one saves the day. You all work together to make the people at the top, and yourself, a little bit, richer. 

But there is no save the day. Maybe a few do, like Elon Musk. But it’s not like everyone in capitalism is treating their work like an art form. And this is the problem. In the changemaker world, everyone’s work is their art. It’s their specific, beautiful, perfect way of changing the world. But it is not a science. It is not business. It is not an ends justifying the means. It is all means justifying ends.

There are literally hundreds of people I know working on essentially the same thing but competing on who does it. And efforts to bring changemakers together to “allow the field to see itself” or “build a movement” or “agree on language” always seems to ricochet off, or create whirlpools where no outputs come out, and people leave with a sense that they’ve accomplished something, when actually they’ve made a lot of flipchart paper diagrams and caused a lot of friction but nothing of fruition.

What is that forcefield?

Could it be, that deep down, many of these people don’t actually care about having an impact and changing the world for the better? Would they rather get their art published and seen and lauded than develop a coherent strategy and collaboration to achieve something? Shouldn’t there be mass coordination of these efforts and division of labour by now? 

Every now and then the odd changemaker will suddenly publish some kind of blogpost where they have written out a list of the different systems that would need to fit together to make systems-level change — things like ‘we need permaculture and also a new education system and also new transport and also ecovillages’ but there is no concerted action to model, plot and project the possible ways ahead, using numbers, and real infrastructure, and models of what is possible and how much it would cost.

Changemaking as it currently stands is like living in an art show which is meant to be a high level strategy meeting. Anyone who has dipped their toes in the high end art world they will know what I mean. Some high end art I respect hugely (you know who you are!), but many areas exist where people masquerade concepts and objects that make no sense and defy rational logic but everybody agrees that it’s amazing and worth a lot of money and people compete and build entire narratives and careers around this stuff.

While art is important, what is the first thing you need on a sinking ship?

Art or lifeboats?

On Automated Ethics

I find my seat on the flight, seat 17D, an aisle seat which is my favourite. I sit down, get comfortable, take a couple things out of my bag and place the bag under the seat infront. The air is blowing into the cabin and I can feel my eyes drying up and the smell of plane and exhaust fumes is present in my nose. The cabin is preparing for lift-off and flight attendants pace up and down and people pile in with their bags, finding available gaps in the overhead luggage lockers.

I’m feeling a bit hungry so I take out a banana which I peel and eat. I pull out my laptop and look at the woman next to me watching a TV series on her tablet. The engines fire up. The shiny plastic covering of the seats and armrests surround me in colours of navy and grey. The lady next to me sips on her coffee. Things are going smoothly.

As often happens for me on planes, my brain lurches out of its default mode of thinking. It is such a foreign environment, so far removed from the everyday, and beyond comprehension that suddenly my body is 30,000 feet above the ground in a metal can.

I find myself thinking about the origin of all of the objects and infrastructure and ‘stuff’ I have in my vicinity. The banana. The laptop. The seats. The plane. My clothes. My books. The banana came from far off soil and different air, from a far off tropical country.  The laptop: carrying traces of minerals mined by slaves in far off African countries. The plane: using compressed dinosaur and plant fuel formed over millions of years to form petrochemicals that will be burned over the next 2 hours to lift 160 humans into the air. 

There is plastic everywhere, from the seats to my headphones to the lids of the takeaway coffee cups on the tables. The plastic was made in a high temperature fractionation columns that compressed more oil into other chemicals and that are then reacted together to make plastic pellets, melted into new shapes.

The guy next to me is eating frankfurters.

It hits me full-on:

We are living off automated cruelty. 

Plastic, fuel, meat, minerals.

What makes us think we are so special that we deserve these things, at the cost of our environment? What is the narrative that runs through our societal operating system, that allows the human species to do this? It’s like we are lacking the narrative that we live on a planet that has scarce resources. But what if that *is* the true narrative? 

You woke up on this planet as a human however many years ago. You opened your eyes and your consciousness landed in this body and you were suddenly just *here* and let’s pretend for the sake of argument a that there are other human-bearing planets, and you could have ended up on any of them. There’s the one with infinite resources and there’s the one which is barren where you need to painstakingly grow nutrients to survive, and there’s this one which is somewhere in the middle - there is enough but not infinite. It therefore has to be *managed*.

So obviously, on this planet we need to regulate the rough amount each person can have, otherwise people who have no bandwidth to work out what that amount is will end up over-consuming, or consuming the wrong things at the wrong times. There’s quite a lot of coordination to be done and calculations of flux and regeneration and per person quotas to happen.

We understand that this is important because the alternative is that we knock our planetary ecosystems into overdrive and feedback loops which could lead to their destruction. And we know that the destruction of those ecosystems ultimately means death and destruction to us, our families, our descendants and everything else that constitutes our living community on earth.

Now I fully understand why people refer to the planet as ‘spaceship earth’. Just like on a spaceship, we have limited supplies, we are travelling through the universe and if we destroy our supplies we will fail our mission to explore the universe and move towards great universal goals like the discovery of all of science or the mysteries of spiritual practices and the possibility of enlightenment and peace all over the planet.

Did we really give this up so that we could grant everyone the chance to fly from place to place? Or to eat the banana fruit instead of the apple? Or to be able to drink coffee while walking so we don’t spill from the mug? Or any of these daily affordances, which on the one hand feel so completely woven into the fabric of everyday life and the “normal” and on the other hand we would give up quite easily if we understood the sheer magnitude of what we were risking as an alternative.

Funnily enough, I get a sense that it is exactly because of the inner hunger and ambition inside many of us to uncover more knowledge, quest towards new frontiers, experience more, see more, consume more, connect everything together, experience higher levels of consciousness and allow free movement of people around the planet that led us to this situation. But we’ve misunderstood the situation.

We’ve been tricked, actually. We can’t see that this is a spaceship, and that we have far bigger goals than simply consuming everything or experiencing everything in a short life. We are a multi-generational species, we are here not to burn brightly and burn up everything we have in the course of a few generations, after so many generations survived in a continuous string of life before.

Sure, we can make individual choices differently. But that isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m talking about megastructures and automated manufacture and so many decisions made that they are impossible to unpick. Nobody is left who is able to un-do what we have done. There isn’t any one person or even a handful of people who can reverse what we have set in motion.

This is no one person’s fault. We can think back to the 100s of years of history that have led us here. The discovery of electricity. The invention of the lightbulb. Of the printing press. Of coloured dyes. Of manufacture. Of the scientific method. From science to engineering. Of transcontinental trade routes. Of the steam engine. Of the limited liability company. Of pollution. Of the health impacts of pollution. Of plastics. Of nappies. Of medicines and vaccinations. Of the patterns scientists were finding happening in the atmosphere. Of plastic, a new, durable, light and long-lasting material which was able to take the place of wood, metal, glass. Of the aeroplane. And helicopters. The lives saved thanks to plastics, vaccinations and helicopters.

It seems very clear that in fact the current crisis is no body’s fault. When I think of the bodies that made all of those inventions and many of those discoveries, I notice that there is a narrative that could be told about those inventions and projects mostly run by male-bodied humans. Would it have been different if they were female? Or would we also have proceeded with excitement, passion, determination, and persistence to create and discover more, convinced it was for the good of humanity? Convinced it was the ‘right’ thing to do?

How could we have known that we were on the wrong side? That each step we took towards manufacturing and automating and abstracting and producing was a step towards the consumption of everything we had left? Did it ever occur to us that there might not be enough? That we were pushing and accelerating in the wrong direction? When was the off-ramp from our current trajectory to a different one? Did we miss the boat? Or is it still yet to come? Who decides? When?

Is it right that it is all available and created and then it is our choice whether we buy it or not? I think about other situations in life where people attempt to apply self-driven motivation or morality to their life choices. Diets. Think of all the diets that have failed. Think of how much harder it is to diet when you live in an area or household that is full of chocolates and other unhealthy foods.

We’re living in a world of automated cruelty and asked to self-regulate our choices, to fight automation, to sacrifice speed, ease, taste, nutrition, variety, colour, experience, discovery, travel, for an abstract notion that it would be ‘better for the environment’. 

What we need is a world of automated ethics.

G. K. Chesterton said, “It is the great peril of our society that all its mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle… A man's minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. But with us the reverse is true; our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change.”

What we need is an ethics so easy, that it becomes as banal as what we choose for lunch.

Action learning sets

As I research new ways to foster deep cultural shifts and transformation in organisations, I came across “Action Learning Sets” which I thought would be interesting to others to read about too.

History of action learning sets

Reg Revans developed action learning in the 1940s at the National Coal Board. He was a scientist, university professor and management consultant. He was also a very practical man, keen to develop new ways for managers to learn and develop together. Revans was aware that, although it is a valuable starting point, training alone did not always bring better results in the workplace.

Essentially he said that, in order to truly learn, we need to relate training to our own experience and question how to apply it to our own needs and challenges. Action Learning has developed in the last sixty years as a method for individual and organisational development. He was one of the first to encourage nurses, doctors and managers within the National Health Service to talk together, listen and understand one another.

How does it work?

There are many different ways to do an Action Learning Set. Here is one way: the Action Learning Set is made up of a group of between 5-7 people.  These are usually peers or at a similar level of responsibility and experience. They can be from one organisation or from a range of organisations.

The group agrees to meet regularly over a fixed period- from as little as 6 weeks to as long as 18 months. They come together find practical ways of addressing the ‘real life’ challenges they face, and to support their own learning and development.

The set normally has a trained facilitator who guides the process, though it is possible to run without this support if participants are experienced and disciplined.

Essentially set members are encouraged to find their own solutions to challenges and issues through a structured process of insightful questioning combined with a balance of support and challenge from the group.

Set members normally agree some ground rules at the beginning of the process and review them throughout the period they’re working together. Over time, and as trust builds, the group learns together.

Assuming the set has a facilitator their job is to help shape the work of the group. They ensure that the ground-rules are followed and that the learning is clarified. They may intervene a lot at the start of the group and much less as the group grows in confidence and competence. A typical set meeting might last 2-3 hours.

An example of an Action Learning Set meeting

Here is how the organisation =mc2 structures their Action Learning Set meetings:

• At the start of the meeting each member ‘checks in’- feeding back on progress or changes since the group’s last meeting. They may well be feeding back on commitments they made at the previous set meeting.

• One or more members then seeks permission from the others to share/present- an issue they’re dealing with at work they’d like to explore. This should be a concrete project and not one with a simple solvable answer.

• The set agrees an initial person to focus on and the issue to be addressed- this is sometimes called ‘claiming airspace.’ The presenter outlines the issue or challenge they’d like to consider. They may use statements like: ‘I’d like to explore’, I’m wondering whether’, ‘I’m not sure if’, or ‘I’m puzzled by.’

• Set members ask questions designed to help the presenter analyse the concern they have, clarify what the challenge is and why they’re struggling to deal with it. The do this by asking open questions moderated by the facilitator.

• These questions can take a number of forms: e’. g. clarification – ‘Are you saying that…?’, understanding – ‘Could you explain this issue a bit more…?’, checking implications – ‘You said before that.. so If that’s so then what would happen if…?’, to explore possibilities – ‘Have you thought of…?’ or ‘Would x,y,z … be useful’

• It’s important that set members don’t offer advice, or opinions. They also need to avoid using the airspace for telling their own stories or discussing their issues. The focus must be on the on the presenter and on the issue they’re working to resolve.

• At the end of a period – 15 minutes or so – the presenter reviews their thinking and selects one or more courses of action which they then commit to. In dong so they are committing to take action and to be held accountable for action at the next meeting. Then another group member presents.

• The group might then typically reflect on the quality of the group process, and reflecting on what was successful and less successful and how they might improve for next time. The facilitator may take a leading role in this and offer the group feedback on their process.

• Once back at work the presenter applies the insights they gained to their work issue. They will consciously choose to note what worked and not in order to report back to the group on effectiveness. And they bring that learning back to the next meeting.

And that’s it!

Pretty intuitive, but still thought it worth sharing here. Enjoy!

Warm Data Lab hosted in London on 24th September

Next week, as part of the Climate Strike, we will be hosting a Warm Data Lab in London on the topic "Well-being in a Changing World”.

We will meet at the Archbishop Amigo town hall in Southwark/Lambeth Rd on the 24th September at 16:30 until 19:00 and be introduced to the Warm Data Lab methodology, guided through the practice, and a reflection.

More on Warm Data Labs here: https://batesoninstitute.org/warm-data/ and Nora Bateson

Event link here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wellbeing-in-a-changing-world-…

This is from Kate Genevieve to read more, cc Emily Stewart:

The Warm Data Labs I've attended have stretched me, opened up fresh understandings, smashed my binary thinking, made me laugh, put me in cold sweats, submerged me in incandescent confusion and pushed me beyond my edges... I can promise it's real learning through play and solidarity!

Warm Data Labs are group conversations that go deep into the most complex issues of our time. These Labs developed by Nora Bateson are a way of activating ecological thinking in communities and sharing knowledge from many angles. Inclusive and welcoming - the practice places trust in the capacity of the collective and lets the wisdom of lived experience lead.

Our best chance for supporting a planetary transformation is through addressing the complex conditions underpinning the climate crisis together. And if we're going to meet this for real there's a necessity to make room for multiple and contradictory perspectives and go far beyond what we know already. It's humbling. And healthy!

During this week of Climate strikes, Warm Data Labs on the theme of “wellbeing” are held around the world: in Rome, Barcelona, Berlin, Bosnia, Sweden and the US. If you're in London, join in on Tuesday. And invite friends - the more, the warmer 🔥

Horizontal leadership is hard

That feeling when people say that non-hierarchical leadership and horizontal practices are "simple" and easy and they've read all the books, and then proceed to behave super hierarchical right in front of your eyes 🙈

Cyclical patterns and unintentional mentors

It's been very interesting spending a bit of time with this man during his stay in our house in London. What's been fascinating is speaking to someone who had almost exactly the same vision as I have held for a new university, 10 years before, and hear about the wrong-turns and patterns that emerged and I recognised... We need more transfer of experience, "failures", and learning so that we don't just cyclically do the same things again and again.

The Anti-Preneur Manifesto

Something that influenced me a lot in this path of labelling and unlabelling and resisting the pull to become sucked into the labels that “work”.

This piece is written yy Danielle Leduc, from March/April 2013 Adbusters…

Thank you to Andrea for the subscription to Adbusters which continued throughout the years :)

The Anti-Preneur Manifesto

I don’t want to be a designer, a marketer, an illustrator,
a brander, a social media consultant, a multi-platform
guru, an interface wizard, a writer of copy, a technological
assistant, an applicator, an aesthetic king, a notable
user, a profit-maximizer, a bottom-line analyzer, a meme
generator, a hit tracker, a re-poster, a sponsored blogger,
a starred commentator, an online retailer, a viral relayer,
a handle, a font or a page. I don’t want to be linked in,
tuned in, ‘liked’, incorporated, listed or programmed.
I don’t want to be a brand, a representative, an
ambassador, a bestseller or a chart-topper. I don’t want
to be a human resource or part of your human capital.

I don’t want to be an entrepreneur of myself.

Don’t listen to the founders, the employers, the
newspapers, the pundits, the editors, the forecasters,
the researchers, the branders, the career counselors,
the prime minister, the job market, Michel Foucault or
your haughty brother in finance – there’s something else!

I want to be a lover, a teacher, a wanderer, an assembler
of words, a sculptor of immaterial, a maker of instruments,
a Socratic philosopher and an erratic muse. I want to be
a community center, a piece of art, a wonky cursive script
and an old-growth tree! I want to be a disrupter, a creator,
an apocalyptic visionary, a master of reconfiguration,
a hypocritical parent, an illegal download and a choose-
your-own-adventure! I want to be a renegade agitator!
A licker of ice cream! An organizer of mischief! A released
charge! A double jump on the trampoline! A wayward
youth! A volunteer! A partner.

I want to be a curator of myself, an anti-preneur, a person.

Unlimited availabilities. No followers required. Only friends.