informal coalitions

On Climate Change...

Last Friday I attended a Writers' Group meeting in London. The title of the session was "Writing as a source of strength and action in the climate crisis".  We were each invited to bring along some of our own or others' writing on the topic, as inroads into some in-session writing and conversation. 

 

Never having written on the subject, I decided to 'give it a go' the day before the meeting. As is often the case, I started by creating a diagram, to help me make sense of what I see as some of the main factors involved.  I then wrote a few brief reflections on the related challenges, contradictions and choices that flow from this, and which affect us all...

 

• There can often be tension and conflict between pursuing ‘local’ (e.g. UK) COMMUNITY needs and ambitions whilst, at the same time, acting in ways that recognize and respond to global CLIMATE imperatives. Despite this, the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ are inextricably linked – inter-dependent aspects of everyday life.

• Given that the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions only account for around 1% of the global total, the UK should focus its ‘outward’ CONTRIBUTION on the global pursuit of Net Zero whilst working to counter the CONSEQUENCES of global warming and climate action on the local environment (e.g. coastal erosion, flooding, heatwaves, wildfires, wind damage, security of energy supplies, etc.).

• Positive actions include the fostering of inter-country, COLLABORATION to address specific climate-related social and technological issues, as well as building COALITIONS of support for action in relation to shared interests relating to the broad climate-change agenda.

• At the core of the country’s response should be efforts to mobilize the purposeful COMMITMENT of members of the general public, business decision-makers and relevant specialists in the private and public sectors, etc. to the broad direction of travel. If people are to commit to the climate change agenda, they need the motive, means and opportunity to do so.

• From this perspective, achieving Net Zero should not be treated as a win-lose COMPETITION between nations but as a collective endeavour.

• Underlying all of the above is the need to take COMPLEXITY seriously. Given the real-world ‘wiggliness’ (i.e. complex social dynamics) of everyday human interaction, all that anyone can do is to muddle through life – acting forwards, moment to moment, into a continuously emerging and unknowable future. A future that they and everyone else are perpetually creating together through their ongoing interactions. The challenge for everyone – both individually and collectively – is to strive to do so with purpose, courage and skill.

 

The Paradox of Immersion and Abstraction

In the excellent Complexity and Organizational Reality, Ralph Stacey argues that people are “simultaneously immersed in the experience of local interaction and abstracting from it at the same time”. That is to say, abstraction is fundamental to the ways in which people make sense of their own and others’ experience and take action.  This begs the question as to what extent, and in what ways, abstraction is congruent with the complex, self-organizing and emergent, dynamics of organization. And this is one of those very rare occasions in which my perspective differs, in one important respect, from that which he sets out in this book and elsewhere.

Contribution Statements and the 'Activity Trap'

When I was working as an in-house manager in the late-‘80s, I was co-opted onto a number of working parties relating to the impending privatisation of the UK electricity supply industry.

At one meeting, draft job descriptions were handed out by representatives of one of the leading consultancy firms, who had been engaged to support this review. These related to the roles of senior managers in the new company's major power plants.

I immediately challenged the worth of what I saw as little more than an anodyne list of task-related activities; arguing that these didn’t inspire me in any way. The Group Manager, who had been overseeing the work, argued that these weren’t meant to inspire people; with the lead consultant adding, that “nobody reads them anyway”!

I said that, as written, these bore little relationship to the role that I was performing day-to-day; and that, given the fundamental shift in the nature of the business that we were embarking on, I certainly wanted to be inspired by the changes that were coming along. At that point, the Director who was chairing the meeting signalled a break.

During the ‘interval’ he told me that he agreed with the comments I’d made but that he hadn't wanted to undermine his Group Manager by openly saying so. Instead, he asked me to write to him with my thoughts. In response, I sent him a short note relating to what I called “Contribution Statements"; together with draft examples of what these might look like for the senior management roles on each of the operating plants.

Starting with a ‘blank sheet of paper’

Some years back, I was facilitating an issue-based workshop with a senior management team. The focus was on the future shape and direction of the unit. At one point, the Unit Head said to the group that he was fed up with reflecting on the past and that he wanted to “start with a blank sheet of paper”, in their shaping of the desired future.

In response, I said that this was not credible way to proceed, given the complex social dynamics of organization and the implications of these for what is and isn't possible. To illustrate the point, I wrote the words “THE PAST” on the top sheet of a writing pad, tore off the page and threw it into the waste bin. This left what appeared to be a "blank sheet of paper" on top of the pad. A quick rub with a pencil, though, showed that an imprint of the words “THE PAST” remained.

Path-dependency

A short time before my Mother died, she said that she wanted to tell me something.

"Before I met your Dad", she confided, "I was engaged to someone else. But he was killed in a motorcycle accident." Why this was preying on her mind became clear when she said, "So, you nearly had a different Dad".

That's not the case at all, of course :-). If the accident hadn't have happened, or if her fiancé had survived and they'd married as planned, I wouldn't have existed at all. To my Mother, though, my being born was a given. A 'Big Dot', so to speak, in the story of her life.