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Episode Transcript
Lisa: So Imandeep, thank you so much for coming on the Leadermorphosis podcast. I’m really looking forward to talking to you. I thought maybe we could start because, um, I confessed to you before we started recording that I’ve been following you for a few years and have been a little intimidated by the kind of depth and breadth of the brilliant work that you’re doing. So how would you describe to listeners that perhaps are discovering you for the first time—how would you describe your work and what you’re trying to achieve in the world?
Imandeep: Thank you so much for having me. And I guess the first thing I would want to say is certainly not to be intimidated. I guess at the heart and the core of this work is that it’s boringly ordinary, right? It is work that is about the civic infrastructure, the social infrastructure we experience in our lives, and if that’s done really well, then it’s not something that you go around, you know, bowing down in front of. It’s things that you take for granted.
It is the benches you sit on, the connections you make, the public squares you walk through, the high streets you experience. And of course, you know, now we’re people of a certain generation are experiencing what it’s like to have had that completely ripped away and to have that underfunded, under-cared for, undervalued. And for us, the work since Impact Hub Birmingham and now Civic Square has at its heart always been about what is the infrastructure—particularly the social and civic infrastructure—for the challenges of the 21st century.
It’s through that journey that we’ve discovered lots, and we’ve discovered the scale of complexity and entanglement and reimagination of systems that need to happen in order for that to flourish in a way that isn’t beautiful examples of communities or places rising up against the backdrop of austerity, of a lack of value, of a lack of understanding—not the economic models and finance stories that can make those thrive as well as the political and ideological will or understanding about what we’ve ended up doing.
And so, yeah, of course, absolutely, like when we unpack some of that through this chat, we will probably get to some bits where it starts to get more complex, and we have to think about radical reimagination. But at the heart of it, you know, from day one when we first started TEDx Birmingham, it was about bringing like-minded people into a room and starting to say really simply: surely the people of their place need to have real skin in the game and a real chance to be part of building, crafting, making, imagining their places. And surely with the scale of challenges that we have, they need to be at the forefront of reimagining the world and the world we live in and our own lives to meet those challenges.
And so, yeah, like there are things that even I find overwhelming about some of the scale of transformation that’s required, but it’s certainly at its heart done well should be things that we experience as the democratic access to the tools and the resources and the spaces to build our places, our communities, our families, and to tackle the social challenges—social and ecological challenges that we face.
And I guess just to end on that piece for us, we’re part of an ecosystem of incredible people. We try to really focus in one area and go deep, and we’re trying to really demonstrate now in those clear parts that we’re interested in. But you know, we’ve got partners across the city, across the world, across the country that have built up this body of work and knowledge, and we’re all working to weave those stories together and understand where the leverage points for big change could be whilst also recognizing that so much of what we’re all doing now really is as a result of many people who have been laying the groundwork for that before us as well.
Lisa: It feels like kind of a fortuitous time for us to be speaking because I was reading that you’ve just had like a kind of almost like a digital launch, a retrospective of the first three-year phase of Civic Square. So I’d love to hear, and I’m sure there’s so many things you could talk about, but maybe if you could kind of bring out a couple of highlights of things that you’ve learned from this first phase of Civic Square that we could maybe then dig into a little bit more?
Imandeep: Yeah, absolutely. So in order for me to share a bit about the last three years of Civic Square, it’s important to situate it in the last decade. There’s been some really big key defining moments that kind of changed my 20s at the time, that made me understand and rethink the way I wanted to direct my career. Right? Like, since then I’ve sort of learned that, you know, that word is probably just a bit of a fallacy in this type of work. And there is just work that needs doing and people that need to do it, and it doesn’t fit neatly into the trajectory of career advancement that many of us—I think I would class myself now as a “geriatric Millennial” as they say—well, grad school or university, I think that’s what I am. I’m just on the cusp of the older Millennials.
And so when we built the Impact Hub, it was built from a TEDx community that had been coming together voluntarily to grow bold events and convening, and those events were about putting voices on the stages that were ignored or decentered in the city. And it was, you know, volunteer—we were all doing lots of different jobs, and for many of us in that generation, it was the first time that we’d understood like really the power of going across disciplines and being a bit looser and open about what could be possible.
And that was like, you know, nearly 12 years ago now we first started, and the events grew and grew, and they were inspiring and thoughtful. And suddenly all around me, I could see in the city that people had said, “You kind of just need to get out of Birmingham and make it to London,” that actually there was this beautiful groundswell of incredible energy. And what made it incredibly interesting and thoughtful and rich and deep was the fact that it had more than a hundred nations from all over the world.
Now, not necessarily all here because we wanted to be here—some of us ended up here because we had to be. But you know, what you now found was this diverse, young at heart and young of age demographic in this city with beautiful, bold, convivial movements of art and creativity. And at that point, people started to say, “Like, what’s next? Let’s do something. Let’s make this more tangible and more full-time, and let’s start to transform this into something.” And so came the Impact Hub, which we crowdfunded, and we ran for five years, looking at what it meant to bring people closer together, put them at the heart of tackling systemic social challenges.
And that is the moment that in that particular piece I want to unpack a little bit more to in order to say, look, this is what we’ve been doing the last couple of years at Civic Square. Because in that moment, we were part of an ecosystem of people like Project00, Dark Matter Labs, Open Systems Lab, WikiHouse, the MAYA Group, and hundreds of members and communities burgeoning up all around the world.
And I think at the heart of what was in our local story and partners like Project00 and Dark Matter Labs and Open Systems Lab and WikiHouse and Open Desk was this idea that we’d just come out of this space where social enterprises were going to save everything. And the social—we were the first people to have social investment in a really smart way, and it was like an interesting moment, this explosion of social enterprise and this explosion of that space.
But the thing is, something was really clear, and one of my colleagues indeed, Indy Johar, talks about this really clearly during the early 2010s, mid-2015, which was that we’d—and there’s some great talks online that I encourage you to watch from those early days because actually, it still speaks to the essence of what we have been trying to do.
What happened, I think, and what many of my peers think during that boom of social enterprises—we took a Silicon Valley tech model to how we were going to think about social change: the explosion of accelerators and funds and incubators. And we took this idea of “you take 10 businesses, social businesses, you incubate them, you accelerate them, you put some money in them, they’ll grow,” and so on and so on, this new era of social, more ethical business.
There’s all sorts of loopholes within that that people have managed to get around, and also loads of great things that have happened. But fundamentally at the heart of that was this story that you could replicate a model that actually worked on an idea of “Cool, we’ll put 100 million into these tech businesses on an accelerator, eight will fail, one will 10x, one will 100x, and the investor will get their money back.” This could well—if this was true in social business, and something’s gone wrong, right?
And also, what it was driving is a single-point solution focus, right? So this app for mental health, this thing for this. Now, that does not mean that I’m saying that those interventions weren’t important—of course they were. We know lots of brilliant things that have been accelerated from that period. So it wasn’t that it was not good; it just wasn’t enough. Because what we started to realize, and what I saw particularly bumping into Project00 and then the early days of Dark Matter Labs, is that that tech intervention or that app or that small business was one of a mesh of things creating a challenge.
The early work that was seminal for me that has been built on incredibly by people like Centric Lab was seeing the obesity systems map done by the Cabinet Office back in the early 2010s, right? Which showed that there are many elements—from the home you live in to your history to your medical history to your family history to the conditions you live in to the air pollution in your place—that impact obesity, right? These are products of systemic challenges. And yet “how many calories you put in and you burn off” is a part of it, but it’s not the whole story. And you know, Centric Lab and others have gone on to do amazing work to show that even better now.
Or stories like the fact that some of our researchers in our recent work that I’ll talk about shortly showed examples of studies across the world where South Asian people are more prone to diabetes because their bodies are starvation-adapted. And the reason why they’re starvation-adapted is a few generations ago, they experienced famine at the hands of colonization.
So you start to look at these maps and webs, and it’s not that that era was not good, or it’s not that any of the bits we’re all doing across finance, across governance, across tech, across social enterprise, across charity—it’s not that they’re not good, and it’s not that we don’t need them all, but they’re just fundamentally not enough in this siloed way, right?
And another last example I just want to give to sort of bring in the last couple of years was through the work of another part of the Project00 ecosystem. Alistair Parvin, one of my colleagues there, and Indy Johar again have talked about this extensively. Once WikiHouse had got to millimeter precision construction—it’s an MMC system that allows you to cut and build housing locally and for people, communities to be part of building it and can be part of lots of great solutions to small sites, to modular building, and so on.
But once they’d built that technology to millimeter precision and it was incredible, and it was like, “Yes, you can build it anywhere, and look at this, and look at the quality!” you started to realize that the challenge wasn’t just “Is the construction equipment enough? Have we done a good enough job in the technical piece?” One of the biggest challenges underneath that was the land system—the land system that made the house cost, you know, whatever, 50 grand, but the land underneath cost anything from, depending if you’re in a rural field in Wales or in central London, extreme amounts of money.
All that—once that was done, actually it became about mortgages and insurance, and who’s going to insure this type of house, or how will you get a mortgage on it, or what is the warranty structure, which Alistair and Dave talked about.
And being amongst all of this as a 20-something-year-old, right? And just watching these people innovate and then realize really deep—well, number one, watching these people first of all find from wherever their own permission to say, “I want to reimagine this system.” First of all, that was inspiring to me because I came from a fairly traditional education, and my parents were pushing education for a good reason, right? But like in a very sort of “you just work your way up, okay?” Get out of the mess that we’ve been in and never have to be in the situation that we were in as immigrants to the country.
And so I was like, always like, “Who said you could do this?” right? Like, “Who said you could do this?” I was always like, “Who said you could just leave architecture and reimagine housing?” Or… and like just starting to learn from them, first of all, this permissioned space, then this commitment and persistence to that innovation, whatever it was, and then that commitment and persistence of saying what we’ve done is amazing.
And the spark of hope—this is the bit that really was that laid the groundwork for the last few years—not only then saying what we’ve done is amazing. You know, Alistair was on TED Talks, he had a TED Talk, and WikiHouse was booming. But then for them to say, “Hey, this is great what we’ve done, and yeah, it’s award-winning, but it’s not enough,” and then to commit to the next era of unpacking the land system or figuring out the planning system or committing to those insurances and mortgages. And I was like, “Okay, this is the real work, right? Here’s the real work.”
And so that was a point in the journey where it started to go from—for me—being enamored by all the possibility and having an awareness of the systemic nature and the deeply entangled, interdependent nature of our challenges, and combining that with the incredible energy and power that I saw in our neighborhoods, in our communities, in our cities. And that was the groundwork.
Now, in the Impact Hub Birmingham, it wasn’t as sophisticated in its like design of our theory of change or action at that time. It was really trying to test and learn and understand and be amongst people who I think were really pushing that space. And towards the end of the Hub, we came across an author called Kate Raworth who had written “Doughnut Economics.”
And she came and visited us, and so exploded this group of people we were working with even more because what we’re starting to realize is that there’s a real deep redesign of the land contract, there’s a deep real need to deeply redesign the way in which we work together, our governance systems, how things are financed.
And then Kate had popped up onto our radar, and this book had come out. And the sort of subheading of the book is “Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist.” It had just put these big ideas, not these answers, not saying “this is exactly what we need to do, it’s this or it’s that,” but “here’s seven big psychological, mental mode, mental model shifts that we are going to need to make to move from an extractive and divisive economy by design to a distributive and regenerative by design one.”
And so as we came towards the end of the Impact Hub, we started to realize these that in order to manifest the worlds that we believe are possible—yeah, like I said at the beginning of this, they are boringly ordinary and beautiful in every day once they’re done well—but underneath them are systems and stories, some that are purposely designed to extract, some that are just archaic and outdated for our time, some that lack imagination, some that need redesign. But at the heart are these big shifts around our economic models, our land system, how we govern, how we finance, how we organize.
This stuff that we sort of talk about as the “dark matter” in our work, which I’ll talk a bit more about later. And so became the beginning of understanding that that work is going to be as important as all of the things that you can touch, see, and feel. And I’ll explain a little bit later about how we’ve structured that in the way that we work.
And so closing the Hub on the eve of moving into Civic Square, which we can talk about, was a really clear example of that for me. Because we needed to get going, the energy was high, we crowdfunded, but we took a lease with a landlord that was a fairly extractive standard—like a Saudi person who owned the building. And it was probably just a number on a property investment.
And so we would see that on the surface, the Hub looked like this incredible, amazing, convivial, inspiring place. And right to the last day, people were like just, you know, devastated it was closing. But it was a great example of “it kind of doesn’t matter how much energy and effort and inspiration and imagination and creativity we put in if systematically that is never going to flourish over the long term because there are these models extracting all the value and wealth out of it.”
So for us, that was the backdrop to what happened over the last few years. And I’ll pause now because you might want to come back with another question or something, and we can definitely go back into that three years. But I think it’s really hard to talk about why we’ve done what we’ve done recently in isolation because it’s important, but I don’t think it makes sense really without that depth of journey that we’ve been on.
And also, like, because this is a leadership podcast, it’s really like I don’t want to underestimate how much most of our work is a result of learning that persistence is one of the key things at the heart of this, and an ability to compound and continually learn and say, “Okay, I might have spent years achieving this, and it’s amazing, but I also need to understand that it’s not enough, and there’ll always be more, and there’s many other people that that needs to be connected to.” So that’s a little bit of the history, and I’ll pause for a moment just in case you want to come back on anything.
Lisa: Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I just want to share like what comes up for me listening to you is, I’m so often talking to people on this podcast who—oftentimes it’s people who were who are in the kind of organization, like for-profit space, say—but the more you do this work, the more you bump into, you know, all of the systems that kind of constrain what’s possible. And people often realize, “Well, if we’re reinventing work, then we’ve also got to reinvent education,” or “We’ve also got to reinvent communities and economic models.” And it quite quickly becomes entangled.
And yeah, I’m really interested to unpack that together about what you’ve learned in the kind of two dimensions of—you know, one thing is the kind of structures, systems piece and governance and stuff like that. And then also, you know, as you said, this kind of leadership, the mindset shift. You know, how do we shift how we are with each other, both within your team and also with the kind of projects and the ecosystems you’re interacting with? That to me is super interesting.
Imandeep: So I said because actually what you’ve just described can rapidly become unbelievably overwhelming, like, “So if we can’t unpack all these different systems, then what’s the point?” And I don’t think that’s the lesson to be taken from this. It really is that we have to be where we are, deep and unpacking and connected and interdependent and entangled and humble that we might do TED Talk-winning work or prize-winning work, and that it will be insufficient in that moment, it will need to connect with many others. It will need to understand itself in a long struggle around the political ideology in this time. Or it will need to see itself as continually compounding and learning and a never-ending, never-finished piece of work. It will need to see itself as “sometimes progress will matter more than perfection,” and progress will matter more than the perfect ideology of how we wanted it to go. And at other times, absolutely holding that radical imagination tight and strong will also be important.
So it really is like a bumpy, bumpy journey of learning a lot of that. But to wrap into kind of like where we took it next into Civic Square and how we organized all of that learning from the Impact Hub and TEDx—and then I can come back a little bit on sort of maybe the personal leadership journey of that because I think they should be untangled a little bit. But I’m very excited to talk about that as well because, well, it’s been incredible but one heck of a bumpy journey.
So for us, what we wanted to then do is organize into a way that we could understand these typologies of work. We knew that this civic and social infrastructure as a platform for neighborhoods to organize together in the face of deep challenges and having access to the tools and resources to manifest new possibilities and be at the forefront of their own climate transitions and so on was going to be important. But at the heart of this, we wanted to then go, “Okay, well, what have we learned from the Hub?”
And so we started to try and—the big learning was not to be too prescriptive about the “what” and start to get really right in our minds about the properties of the work that mattered. And so we built out like a theory of change—and I’m doing quote fingers because I hate that. We could say “theory of action,” we could say “theory of something”—we like the language is inappropriate really when it comes to that.
We’ve built the sort of framework of how would we keep ourselves like on track and understanding our work through the ideas of what we just described as “matters.” And I’ve talked about it before in the Dark Matter piece—this physical property, right? It’s got like a physical element to it, a physics element to it.
The Dark Matter, this stuff under the surface that you can not always see, and it’s not always tangible, but they are things that pretty much drive everything: our economic system, our codes and norms and cultures and rules that are either real or perceived. You know, the social contract that we build that is like intangible but drives everything. The way we finance, the way we govern, our land contract—these are things that you don’t like—they’re not in everyday conversation, but they drive everything. They drive why the High Street is in the state it’s in. They drive why you walk past in your neighborhood and see empty bits of land and dream about what you could do on it, but you can’t, basically, without heroics.
And so this dark matter analysis, redesign, partners working with needed to be at the core of that. And then simultaneously thinking about the Dream Matter, this imagination space, this space that goes way beyond what is now, this space that can say our economic system can be radically different, this space that can say, if you look at the work of the MAYA group, that the black radical imagination can be at the heart of how we redesign these spaces—where you can leap and you can think beyond the shackles of now or the very near immediate future, whilst also having an assessment of an understanding and a practice of thinking in the long term, thinking beyond your time.
And so for us, this dark and dream matter were these physical properties that needed to be in the work that were then supported and anchored by what we just called as the “everyday matter,” right? Like how that manifests into the everyday, whether it’s in the learning, in the practice, in the convening, and eventually into the infrastructures that just become boringly ordinary, right?
Like, when you walk down the street, you don’t thank the street lamps—I mean, you might if you’re a woman and it’s late at night and you’re glad they’re on—but you don’t thank them. But as soon as they’re not there, you would notice. You’d be like, “Hold on a second, this is really important infrastructure for us to function as a society.”
And so what we found during the Hub and in the early years of Civic Square as we’re trying to unpack this, that in any work we’ve ever done, it might start from a different point. Like, we might start with a more Dark Matter systems analysis, we might start with something really ordinary and everyday like a coffee morning, we might start with a radical imagination piece. But in the end, work that thrived the best was when there was a healthy mixture of those three together so that you weren’t like, “We’ve got this really good idea,” and then you’re shutting it down by going, “Yeah, well, that’s never going to work because unless you change the whole land system, it’s never going to work.”
Or, you know, “I want to do this really imaginative thing,” and then someone’s like, “Hey, well, yeah, it’s not pragmatic enough,” right? And you just end up in this endless—and I find this, I’ll talk about it later happily in the leadership space—I just found it stifling all the time, this space we created where it didn’t matter which direction you were going in, someone was ready to tell you why that wasn’t enough, right? And rightly so.
But how do we sit within that then, and how do we build partnerships and ecosystems and nurture groups of people working together and able to acknowledge and value and look deeply into the things that they were specifically focused on or working on, but to be able to see ourselves in the wider piece and to be able to say, “Well, yeah, it’s kind of an and all of those things.”
And in the end of the day, something can be intangible, invisible, not understandable to the everyday person immediately, and be valuable. Something can also need to be accessible, simple, easy entry point, and be important. Something can be radical and imaginative, and be important. And they can sit together instead of butting these ideas and this work all up against each other.
As if, like, the first thing you’re doing if you’re redesigning a financial instrument for, I don’t know, retrofitting thousands of homes—the first thing you’re not thinking about is, “How do I go and talk to someone about it over a coffee morning?” It doesn’t mean you eventually don’t need to get there, and it’s not important, but it’s just not the first thing you think.
And so I was just seeing so much shutting down of great stuff and such a lack of ability to really go, “You know, all of this matters, and it’s about how we organize ourselves and our knowledge systems and our systems of practice and our organizations, our work. It’s how we organize it, right? Neither is more important than another, and none is good enough on its own.”
And so that’s how we kind of started to organize that piece of work. And where all those physical properties and then where it met this very practical, tangible thing we were building was continuing in a lot of our work, particularly with Dark Matter Labs, this idea that we’re going through a great transition.
Carlota Perez talks about it in her work about transition periods and the economics of that and how long they last. And I got really obsessed with this, particularly early 2020, probably because we were at home a lot, or some of us were at home a lot. And I started to really listen to a lot of what some of my peers were talking about around times of transition in the past where we had understood infrastructure responses to it.
And two examples really jumped out for me that were really big. One was post-war, when the NHS was formed and the country was sick and unproductive and needed to rebuild its economy and its GDP. And again, like you probably can’t see me, but I’m doing quote-quotes on that because, you know, those were particular understandings of what progress looked like.
But you know, at that time, no prime minister, no matter how much he trusted them or their leadership, could stand at the front and say, “Could everybody just go and get healthier?” I mean, “Can just go and get healthy?” And then people are like, “Oh, well, what do you mean? What do we do?”
Same at the time of the more tech, the transition from a more industrial era to a more technical one. No one was just able to say, “Can you just go and get smarter? We need people that are smarter and can operate in a different way or to the needs of today.” What happened is there was infrastructure responses.
So came the libraries, the neighborhood libraries and the community libraries to democratize access to knowledge. So came the NHS, and when we built the NHS, we built a national system, we built regional systems, we built specialty hospitals, and it grew over many, many decades. But fundamentally, we built the neighborhood GP, the democratic access to health, the spaces, the communities, the connections, the special skills, the tools at your doorstep within, you know, half a mile or a mile walk.
If you’re my age—geriatric Millennials—I’m sure you can remember walking to go and see a health visitor or your GP like in your neighborhood. I remember it. I remember it, and I didn’t grow up in a—I grew up in a poor city neighborhood. I remember the local library being a place that was close to walk to, easily accessible.
And so I became really obsessed with this idea and really interested in this and other things like the social housing movement that we were able to accelerate at a time where it was really required quickly.
And so I was really interested in, “Well, what’s the equivalent of the neighborhood GP for the climate transition?” Not saying that the national and regional and international responses weren’t important—of course they were, absolutely. What happens at a national level, at a legislative level, at a level of our ideology, what happens at a regional city level is really, really important.
But where’s the democratic access to the tools, the spaces, the ideas, the communities, the networks, the specialist skills for neighborhoods to be at the forefront of their own transitions?
And for me, not just because it’s a moral piece—that moral piece is definitely in my politics and definitely in what I believe about the world—but increasingly, I’m not that interested just about the moral story. In this, in our work more recently, over in retrofit, in street-based retrofit and collective retrofit, you start to realize that the numbers don’t add up. Like, we physically can’t do what we need to do as quickly as we need to. We don’t have the supply chains, the skills, the material budget, the organizing to just do this from a top-down perspective.
Most of our deep transitions that we need to make in our lives, in the way in which we interact with the natural world, in the way we need to repurpose, retrofit, and rebuild our places, needs the equivalent of the neighborhood GP. It needs access to tools and resources.
So it’s where what we’ve been really doing is focusing on what that looks, feels like—how it’s built, how it’s designed, how it’s owned, how it’s financed, what can it achieve. As well as unpacking and seeing whether it’s possible to tell those stories and unpack those stories and co-design those stories of the large-scale transformations we need with our local neighborhood.
And so that really is the kind of underlying thesis behind Civic Square, but not in a way that encourages other people to go out and have to do massive projects like this, but to say that our school playgrounds, our schools, our GPs, our libraries are only open a few hours a week, our high streets—these are all components of infrastructure that we need to repurpose to be fit for the 21st century. And that need to at their heart, if we’re being serious about the scale of climate and ecological crisis, they need to be democratic access for the tools, the spaces, the knowledge, the resources, etc. for neighborhoods to be part of this story—not the only bit, not in spite of the city, the region, the nation-state, but interdependently.
And that without it, yeah, there is a moral and ethical story that I’ll happily bang on about for hours, but I don’t even think it’s that. I think these are ideas that will transcend the left and right in the future. This is about whether we can practically meet the scale of the challenges, whether we can create livable places. And no matter how much we think that it doesn’t matter at the moment that that’s equitable and just, books like “Tipping Point” and all the evidence shows that unequal societies—like there’s nowhere, there’s no escape to Mars, you know? That isn’t a true story.
This is going to need all of us, and this impacts everyone now. My politics doesn’t necessarily align with “Well, it’s just a practical, pragmatic story,” but I do think beyond the moral and ethical piece, things like the neighborhood GPs—you could be on the side of being like “universal health for everyone,” or you could be on the side of “we need people to improve their health because our country’s going down the pan, and we need them to be productive and work.” You could be on either side of those ideologies, and the neighborhood GP still made sense.
And I think that’s the time that we’re at, and I think it’s large scale. And I think that our streets and neighborhoods are the places where a lot of the crises we are facing converge in a way that people understand them. Like, the energy crisis manifests in your bill, thus meaning it’s one of also the places where greatest agency and understanding can also meet great resource, infrastructure, strong vision for a transition that is just and equitable. And that’s really what Civic Square is interested in.
Lisa: Wow, like a million things that I want to bounce off of in that. And I feel like, yeah, we’re just gonna have to have another conversation another time as well because there’s so much rich stuff. But I’m really keen to hear a bit about—you teased your kind of personal leadership journey and all of this, and that’s, you know, one of my focuses. You know, that changing the systems and the structures and the processes isn’t enough, that there’s also, you know, we’re all kind of units of one and relationships and leadership and agency and all of those things are really important. So what’s that journey been like for you? What have you learned? What’s been challenging? What’s been joyful?
Imandeep: Like, so like on the whole, it has been the joyful, like I couldn’t have imagined as a kid that to get the honor to do this kind of work, right? To be to have found ways and to have found people, and to have from the first people who turned up on a cold winter evening to set up TEDx, to the hundreds of people that crowdfunded the Hub, to the thousands of people that made it work every day over the years, to the many thousands over the last three years that turn up with this convivial, joyful, hopeful—like, I’m here.
And you mentioned that you came across me through MAIA—a great example of like just incredible people that were around and say, “I believe in this.” And to the partners who so generously share learning openly, generously. It’s so been the opposite of the patriarchal, upwards, like progress through a career that I’d learned about as a kid. And it has been the absolute honor of a lifetime, and it really still is.
And you know, it doesn’t take me long, even on the worst days, to get back to flippin’ hell, there is so much potential, so much joy, so much want, so many ideas, so much care, there’s so much possibility. And I really, really, really think that we have been done a disservice by the monopolistic ownership of our media because we don’t understand that this is actually what’s happening on our streets and neighborhoods and in our communities.
So yeah, on the whole, good lord, like there is nothing more of a counter-energy to what we face in this country over the last 12 years than to be in relationship with people and to build imaginatively and boldly. And I hope I will always continue to say that.
But yeah, at the same time, it’s been complex, right? And like there’s a complexity that is me in my role in relationship to the work which is, yeah, largely to do with systems of power, funding, a lack of ambition and pace and trust that I think those who steward large amounts of wealth and money have not been able to grapple with quickly enough, how to move it, and the lack of power you then have when you’re open, when working in an open market, right? Where the private sector can always come in and undercut you on that piece of land or on that building or that piece of work. That has been difficult.
And I think we’re all working through that, right? There’s pioneers across philanthropy, across local government, across all over the place. And I talk about that quite openly on my social media and other things.
And then there’s a side that’s the interpersonal piece on this, which I think is, if I’m honest, pretty brutal. Pretty important. I’ve been really lucky to be alongside amazing peers. We regularly get together and try and figure out like how to make our way through the seemingly impossible 101 ridiculous decisions you’ve had to make before breakfast and still need to do your work and figure out a lot of that.
And I guess I want to do a shout out for this piece by Maurice Mitchell, and it’s called “Building Resilient Organizations: Towards Joy and Durable Power in a Time of Crisis.” But Maurice basically unpacks—I’ll happily share the link so you can maybe share this out to people—I have to say that the minute this article came out, those peers that I’ve been building alongside and working with, like we were sharing it in a DM, and everybody was like, “Has this guy been in the coffee shop with us?” Like, “Hold on a second, sorry, but what’s happening here?” Because he basically—if it’s not too much for me to say this—he unpacked so much of what I think our generation of leadership is going through and is grappling with in such a beautiful and thoughtful way.
And I guess some of the things I can just speak to, like to almost leave food for thought for another conversation, right? Maybe we can come back in, and you can pick on the two or three things that you loved, and we can go into them much more deeply. I’ll be more than happy to do that because it’s always really helpful—these conversations are really helpful reflections for myself, reflections for people who—like, nobody often wants to hear what it’s really like because if you hear what it’s really like, then you might have to just—that veneer of joyful, beautiful, radical work has to come down for a minute, and there’s a human behind it, all those humans behind it.
And I guess, look, if my co-founders and fellow legal stewards were on this, they’d talk about all their own different journeys. But I know this is definitely more about me and this for the sake of this podcast. And I guess I do want to say that it is—you know, for a generation that has seen the potential of what could be, who—like, when I started the Hub, I didn’t know what I was going to be doing is setting up an organization and becoming a director. I literally—I’m not even joking you—I did not realize that’s what that would involve.
I mean, what I’d understood about entrepreneurship was like Young Enterprise at school. People bought some crystal glasses, they engraved them, and sold them for a bit more. Someone bought sweets, put them into bags, and sold them for double the price. That’s what I thought enterprise was. I didn’t—like I said at the beginning of walking around Project00, I used to ask Alistair and Indy, “Who said you can do this?” Like, I didn’t—our education system or my education had not really helped me to understand that—that’s all of this is just people, you know, incorporating companies and dealing with all that responsibility.
And so I kind of found myself—I didn’t realize—and stepped into it because it was what was required. We needed an entity to hold this thing. But slowly you start to realize that scale of responsibility, what it means to be an employer, what it means to hold that level of constant responsibility, to be needing to be in the practice.
I didn’t come into this as a director of a company. I came into this to be in the practice. But then having these dual responsibilities, never being liquid enough, so you’re ending up doing three jobs. You’re talking about the work in the world to build momentum, you’re in the practice and the figuring out and the doing and delivery, and you’re a director of a whole company.
And yes, you can give this to a board, you can give this to other people, but everyone I talk to knows that in this kind of work, if you have too many people far away from the context making decisions—it doesn’t mean you can’t have professional support and advice through that—but you can’t—we end up in the same cycle of big, hefty NGOs. And that isn’t conducive with the type of iterative, open, bold, imaginative work, even if it brings us a small amount of relative safety and comfort and, you know, false security because things are well-governed and well looked after.
And so I just honestly found myself in this space where I was like, this level of responsibility—and you’re interfacing with people and communities and people who now become your employees. And that employment system is interacting with a 20th century legal culture and norms of what employment is and is completely not fit for purpose.
And I’ll do a shout out for the work of Anette Damiaan, her blog on “Beyond the Rules,” which I’d really—and all the work around that. But the introductory blog really speaks to the challenges of this, and I can share the link again.
Because suddenly you’re an employer, and who teaches you that to create a good job at 25,000 pounds a year with a pension and benefits, you actually need about 40 to 50,000 pounds once you calculate what all of that costs? Who teaches you these things? These aren’t things that you—you bump into it, and you learn it. And while you’re learning it, and whilst you’re trying to unearth and imagine and hold the hope for a future during a decade of austerity, people are—you’re under scrutiny, every decision you make, everything you’re doing, every conversation, every pay rise you can’t do, every decision that can’t happen.
And like, so at the Hub, we did the crowdfund, and we fit out the building, and we had naught pounds in the account. In the first week, we made a few hundred pounds, we shared it out between us, and slowly over months, we started to build that into what were salaries. And so then arrives sick pay, childcare, and maternity.
And you start to realize—and you’re playing—you’re doing this out live. You’re holding the responsibility of that. You’re in the practice of the work. You’re out in the world, in this country, during an absolute show of a decade, holding the hope for a different future—all at the same time, all the time. And that it can be—well, it was—it has been brutal.
And the best of times, there were amazing people and support and peers who could understand the stack of different things intertwining with themselves. And at the worst of times, you’re completely dehumanized. People will take the bit that they want to—you’re the boss now, or you’re their employer now, or you’re the person who was holding those big hopes now, and this has happened. And so it can be quite lonely, it can be isolating.
It can be—no matter how many words you use, you can’t explain—something—some things you just have to accept that unless someone is in that position with that many different things to hold, they might never understand that. And they might never be in that position, and you have to just accept that.
And I think that in a lot of that, this intertwining between enterprise and building the future and this sort of state—you know, when we’re talking about the social enterprise world earlier and social investment, well, given that we replicated the model, we didn’t fund like Silicon Valley though, did we? Silicon Valley flooded its stars to make sure they never wanted for anything so all they could do is focus on building their things. Obviously, that has gone catastrophically wrong, and we’ve seen absolute disasters with that.
But we’re not operating in that reality. We’re on cultivating the radical imagination or building bold futures or talking about transitions, but we’re talking about amounts of money that are still in a space that is tiny compared to what’s needed.
So I guess what I want to say is that I’ve been in this space where I’ve just been figuring this out as we’ve gone along. And that’s really hard, like it’s really, really hard. And it can be really dehumanizing at times, and it can be impossible amounts of pressure before you’ve even had your morning coffee to figure out.
And we’ve been building incredible capacity around that, and I think we’re seeing a new generation of leaders rise up as well. And I certainly can say that with the peers that I work with, two of our legal stewards now are people that joined the Hub as young artists and designers.
So there’s no shortage of hope in my world, but I think the dehumanization at will of the people who have to figure out so much of this is difficult. And I certainly, if I had one thing I wanted to make sure that the next generation didn’t go through, is that—that they really understand, and they are really supported in the amount of things that one has to hold in that time.
But fundamentally, for me, what I know will unlock that is if they have a different economic reality, if they have a different land system, if they have some of those things that are more fundamental to our commons, to how we understand the commons, the rest will be easier to handle.
But yeah, just to finish, I think that article by Maurice Mitchell is probably the best thing I’ve read in the last three years, and I really thoroughly recommend people to read it because it just—I was just like, “I’m sure this guy has been in a coffee shop with me or in all the different scenarios I’ve been in with other peers and leaders working in this space.” And it’s just really, really brilliant.
And so my call to everyone is to tread softly with those of you around you holding a lot of responsibility and actually just listen to what it’s really like. Because I think at the heart of that, we can make some of that interpersonal stuff a lot easier and a lot more understood and a lot less like the 20th century patriarchal ideas of leadership and responsibility.
We’ve made and we need to make a separation between—or we need to be able to make a distinction between—a social and political economy that forces us to have to make certain decisions and what good leadership can do.
So for example, the example I’ll leave you with is that it shouldn’t be a whole bunch of incredible or generous organizations that have progressive sick policies. It should be that our country is not paying 90 pounds a week when you get sick. And when you put the responsibility of the state onto people—not just me—onto people like me, people are in impossible situations.
And of course, all we’ve ever been trying to do is figure out how we move to more generous, more thoughtful policy and work. But it, you know, like we all know that once you get past a few people, that turns into tens and hundreds of thousands of pounds just to make small decisions.
So what we have got to do is make sure that in supporting leadership, that we understand that that which is—particularly in the social and charitable space, where we’re not extracting labor for profit and dividends that we then benefit from—that actually you have to hold the state to account for what the state should be doing and what should be in the public good. Things like our sick pay, our childcare, our welfare state—these are things that should be in the domain of the public good and not into “Did you manage to get a job somewhere where they have a progressive version of that?”
Because when you individualize that responsibility, you put people in impossible binds. And I think that’s what a lot of this generation is stuck in, is this having to take responsibility for a lot more things than just, “Hey, we’ve got to create a good working environment here.” And that’s constant, and it’s been with the backdrop of cost of living and a backdrop of COVID that’s just become exacerbated.
And so we need to hold that two things can be true: that we can lead generous, thoughtful organizations, and that that doesn’t let what we need to make sure that the public good does or the state does off the hook, because what it does is it individualizes that too much. And there’s never going to be enough money.
Like, if you’re extracting dividends for profit in, I don’t know, as an oil company or something, well, yeah, you can demand a damn site more there in the now. But when you’re talking about this whole crop and era of people who were encouraged to be social entrepreneurs and to set up your own—these are impossible things. If I was to try and increase our salaries according to inflation this year, that would need to make an 11% rise, that would mean that out of thin air, I needed to find 170,000 pounds. That’s not—it’s not a thing, right?
And so we’ve got to understand some of that. And so this is all the boring things behind the beautiful stuff that you see in our work with Doughnut Economics and all the vision, because at the moment, I think the journey really has been learning that simultaneously, I’ve got to kind of hold three jobs: I’ve got to be in the practice, I’ve got to be in the communication, I’ve got to be in the nurturing of that in our team and in our neighborhood, and somehow I’ve got to run the organization.
That doesn’t mean I do all the tasks on my own, but if I leave any one of those, suddenly you have an organization not in sync with your mission, or you have people not in sync with this, or your processes and policies that you’re developing snap back to punitive 20th century ones.
And so, you know, it’s a big one. But yeah, read Maurice’s article, and I’d be really delighted to hear people’s thoughts on it as well. And maybe we can pick it up in a future conversation.
Lisa: Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I know many people listening to this will feel really seen by what you’ve just shared, especially people working in the social impact sector, because it’s tough and it’s lonely. And those of us who are exploring and practicing these kind of new versions—or “new” is not even the right word, but, you know, it can be lonely and tough. And I think it’s valuable to share that and to know that there are communities and resources, you know, to support ourselves in that, that we don’t have to do it alone.
