How we came to be how we are…

The aim of this short piece is to give you a brief insight into our Leading Through Storms online sessions; the background, what informs us, our intentions, what we plan for, and some thoughts on ways of working. As ever, life is fluid, and we know that things continue to evolve…

Hope it helps,

Jake, Kirstin & James

www.leadingthroughstorms.org

April 2021

Having discovered the Deep Adaptation work separately, the 3 of us, Alan Heeks and Hazel Hill Wood came together during 2019 with a common interest; to support leaders through these challenging, dilemma-laden and bewildering times.

Since then we have been creating Leading Through Storms; a development programme and community of practice.

We didn’t imagine then that covid-19 would demonstrate to many more of us, and so explicitly, the fragility and interconnectedness of our societies and systems.

As many are observing, and without being crass, what has been experienced over the last twelve months by many of the relatively privileged members of society living in Northern world countries, could be seen as a small taster of what is already felt by the humans and other sentient life in places where the power of the current climate and ecological emergency is already so clear.

Remember those Australian bush fires in from the “Black Summer” of September 2019 — March 2020?

We know that today there is a really broad range of life experienced by our fellow humans under these changed circumstances — from apparently leisurely and creative spaciousness to anxieties about uncertainty to immense injustice, discrimination and suffering — indeed, as many might say, there always has been, is and will be.

And for some of us, there may just be a different level of awareness arising.

The chaos accompanying the changes forced upon organisations are inescapable and driving near-term reactions — an emergency response to the reality of now.

We are really interested in what we can learn about our personal and leadership behaviour at this time.

How can we attend to different time horizons and multiple stakeholders?

Perhaps remember this phrase; “This is an emergency. We must slow down.”

We had to pause. We weren’t (aren’t) entirely sure what to do. Our first considered step was an offering of an online ‘pop-up’ community, connecting leaders from different situations. Feedback demonstrated that these were very helpful, and that some wanted to go deeper. So the closed programmes of spring and autumn 2021 have been designed to meet that need.

We’ll continue to listen in to what will best serve, and will adapt.

Our deep wish is to bring our spirit and skill in service of your, and other leaders’, challenging work.

Our intention is to hold a community of conscious leadership practice, within which you can have space and support to start to develop some of your personal and organisational responses appropriate to the scale, urgency and complexity of the dilemmas we face.

These times are calling for something different from each one of us. We will support you to grow your capability to work generatively with mess, confusion and difficult emotions as well as your own true nature and creative spirit. Developing the qualities and practices of transformational leadership will be core to our work. So we ask: How can we consciously transform leadership together?

We have learnt that if we work with our inner world, through gentle, and persistent, inquiry and reflection, that our actions in our outer world are so much more impactful. We’ve learnt that these are twin tracks, interwoven in our lives.

We believe that forming a supportive group of like-minded people will help us explore uncertainty and experiment safely what we want to do together as leaders, in our organisations. A reflective and intentional community to build our response to real issues. During the pop-up sessions, we’ve seen that participants have taken a range of actions, sometimes singularly, and as relationships developed, so did the possibilities of building something together. It has been encouraging to see these foundations coming along, away from the sessions themselves.

Without proper attention to how we got to where we are today, and awareness of the likely impacts of our apparently good ideas going forward, we are at risk of repeating unhelpful, destructive patterns and practices. Our work together includes cycles of deep reflection, inquiry, exploration, experimentation and review, in service of wise and timely action.

Being in healthy relationship with ourselves, our world and each other will enable us to catalyse vital adaptive moves in our organisations and wider systems. We explore how to make use of our resources, power and different ways of knowing (emotional, physical, as well as cognitive) so that we can adapt as best we can to the predicaments we face.

Perhaps we try to provide space to increase the possibility of working with the whole range of our human experience; our thoughts, our emotional and physical feelings, our relationships with ourselves, colleagues, organisations, the way we make meaning for ourselves, and crucially how well these aspects are integrated into our daily lives and actions.

Although we are meeting online, nature inspires our work. We’ll consciously connect to nature during our time together here and hold the possibility of meeting in person in Hazel Hill Wood when the time is right — perhaps later in 2021?

As you may have picked up, our offering is informed by deep adaptation, inspired by the work of Jem Bendell. Deep adaptation offers a framework for beginning to make sense of the unfolding, and what many would see as tragedy (for human society as we know it, at least), of climate and ecological collapse. Jem’s research reveals, in a new way for many of us, the nature and scale of the problems we face and led him to the conclusion that near-term human (at least) social collapse, as a result of climate and ecological destruction, is now inevitable.

The deep adaptation framework provides an opportunity to reassess our work and life in a ‘no-regrets’ fashion, if we entertain this realization seriously. We can find our best creative responses, personally and collectively. The 4 Rs of deep adaptation are central to our work in this community of practice, since facing into them really seems to liberate creativity. We will touch on them more in our sessions, but as a reminder today they are:

· Resilience What do we most value, that we want to keep?

· Relinquishment What do we need to let go of, so as not to make matters worse?

· Restoration What could we bring back, to help us with these difficult times?

· Reconciliation What do we need to make peace with, to lessen the suffering?

Finally, a few words about our proposed ways of working for our sessions:

· We’re all allies; with a shared purpose of finding our best leadership responses to the crises we face, in support of a just, sustainable and fulfilling world,

· Working together in confidence; the trust that we can speak truthfully and in confidence, enables us to do the work that needs to be done,

· Aware of how power plays; in our relationships, in our organisations and communities, and in the world at large,

· In this reflective space, and grounded in action, reflection and action go hand-in-hand; supporting wise and timely interventions,

· Taking the time to formulate experiments; because we’re all learning as we go, orientating our work as experiments helps,

· Beyond chat; calling on new forms and processes for new insights, because these times are calling for something different,

· Attending to time horizons (now, then, later) and multiple layers (me, us and it), because we need to look at our fullest context, and

· Calling on all our ways of knowing, beyond the intellect, to embrace the wisdom found in our hearts and our guts.

During each session we will orient ourselves to each other and begin to reveal the leadership challenges we are each sitting with, and discover what is going to be of service to us and our work going forward.

Perhaps, put another way, we each continue with our own exploration of what it means to be human at this time, seeking to humbly uncover our best responses to the personal and professional dilemmas we often face.