What does it take to be with what feels unbearable?

Decarbonizing fossil fuels, a panel discussion at the TED Countdown Summit, Edinburgh, Oct 2021

There are moments when we find worldviews colliding. How do we stay in constructive conversation through such discomfort when the stakes are high?

Imagine yourself in the room with this:

A well known climate leader has walked onto the stage of the auditorium. She stands alongside 3 empty chairs and sets out the unusual, perhaps extraordinary, exchange that she will facilitate. Three people with apparently common cause are about to take their seats, each committed to sharing their experiences of leading in the face of climate and ecological collapse: an oil and gas CEO; an impact investor who has had his climate savvy members successfully voted onto the board of another oil and gas giant; and a young climate justice activist.

As the speakers join the stage, there is a palpable sense of expectation in the room. The facilitator clearly sets out the rules of engagement and the exchange gets underway. What unfolds is both predictable and somehow entirely new.

The oil and gas CEO describes the nature of the situation he and his organisation face, including strategically poor choices of the past. He sets out actions his company is taking and, in acknowledging that it is “not enough”, sets out additional actions that he commits to reporting back on within the month. He makes it personal, looking to a future horizon of how he wishes the world to be for his children. In sharing something of the challenges he experiences, he speaks to what many of us recognise as the dilemma-ridden territory of the messy middle phase of transition.

During this, the climate justice activist is visibly using her outbreath to stay sufficiently calm and focused to engage. When invited to speak, she vehemently describes some of the atrocities the CEO’s company has committed. She leans forward, passionately asserting that, in her view, he is “one of the most evil people in the world”. Her rage and pain transmit viscerally. She refuses to continue to share the podium with him and removes herself from the auditorium, supported by fellow activists.

Throughout, the impact investor remains still, not yet with the opportunity to fully share his beliefs about what it takes to make change happen, the actions he is taking to avert the worst consequences of what we face.

As the facilitator invites everyone remaining in the auditorium to take a pause, to connect with and feel into the pain of what the activist, what we all, are feeling, I sense that something important has just happened.

What had it taken, I wonder, for the conveners of this event to include the climate justice activist as a speaker at the 11th hour? How had they, and each of the speakers, weighed the balance of risk and reward, threat and opportunity, that they might have anticipated from this exchange?

I am left feeling deeply grateful that the climate justice activist’s voice had been included and awed by the facilitator’s holding of the space. I wonder what else could have been possible if the activist had decided to engage in dialogue, while carrying no judgement that she did not.

This was a messy, high drama moment that spoke to the activist, CEO and onlooker parts of myself. I reflected: when am I held too strongly by my sense of managerial responsibility for continuity in the short-term at the expense of bold, vital change? What needs to be happening for me to engage, and when do I flee instead? What is the prize, and what is the price, for taking a stand? How might I sit, listen, seek to understand someone who I take as ‘other’ in a way that honours the truth of what they feel and believe, without me feeling that I have to give up my own truths?

It’s addressing questions such as these, constructively, for ourselves and with others, that brought Leading Through Storms into being. We choose to hold compassion for new awareness — supporting people to find their best adaptive responses in the face of significant challenge, strong emotion, profound uncertainty.

What qualities, intentions and practices do you see that make a difference, and how are you able to contribute to the transformations you most deeply wish for? How often are you party to meetings that genuinely hold open the possibility for something new to emerge? Finding and creating pockets of the future in our sometimes contentious present is a vital discipline of our times.

View the full 50 minute exchange here, part of the TED Countdown Summit, October 2021.

Read Barry Oshry’s excellent short work, Encounters with the ‘Other’, for inspiration towards new possibilities for how we meet the ‘other’. As he says, ‘Change the pattern of interaction and our experiences of one another will change’. Published by Triarchy Press.