I am giving myself some time off, so this week’s newsletter is in the form of some quotes that particularly struck me looking through the archive of posts from my old Thinking Practice blog.
I’m not going to expand on their relevance, you can judge that yourselves, but will link to the original posts. My thoughts on the recent Creative Aging conference will come next week, when I will, by some quirk of maths, have aged a year.
Before sharing values, recognise all humans as equals
”While values may be shared within and across cultural, class, racial, religious and other divides, and individuals may be prepared to recognise and stand together on the basis of such values within their particular “group”, more profound divisions of class, culture, “race” and religion often deny them the ability to recognise these with or in those who are less like them. Before sharing values, a more fundamental challenge may simply be to have the “other” recognised as a human being, as an equal….
Before it seeks to explore or share crucial values, the arts – accessible mainly to the moneyed classes of the world – perhaps have a more fundamental role to play: to humanise (for the rich and the powerful) the many millions who exist on the underside of history, who “are born equal in dignity and rights” (at least theoretically) to the rich and the powerful. If only this one “value” were to register and change the way people think, act and pursue their own interests, then the world would be a different place.”
Mike van Graan, in The Art of Life, Missions Models Money & Common Cause
Go home, heroes
“Our heroic impulses most often are born from the best of intensions. We want to help, we want to solve, we want to fix. Yet this is the illusion of specialness… If we don’t do it, nobody will. This hero’s path has only one guaranteed destination – we end up feeling lonely, exhausted and unappreciated. It is time for all us heroes to go home because, if we do, we’ll notice that we’re not alone. We’re surrounded by people just like us. They too want to contribute, they too have ideas, they want to be useful to others and solve their own problems.”
Margaret Wheatley, Leadership in the Age of Complexity: From Hero to Host
Give up on predictability
“I’ve lost faith in reforming anything that calls itself an organisation they inevitably dehumanise us... organisations value people less and less and yet... there’s enormous hope in humanising spaces in organisations.…What dehumanises organisations is the system’s design based on predictability, consistency and control. There can be experiments and exceptions locally for a while, but most often they are killed off by the system’s requirement for consistency and predictability. My aim is to carve out spaces for human possibilities. I cannot change organisations – they have this inbuilt context, and the patriarchy is so deeply embedded in us – but I can decide every time how to occupy the room.”
Come to terms with your own personality
Culture is about “organisation, discipline of one’s inner self, a coming to terms with one’s own personality; it is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one’s own historical value, one’s own function in life, one’s own rights and obligations.”
Antonio Gramsci