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Episode Transcript
Lisa: Bayo, thank you so much for coming on the Leadermorphosis podcast. I’m really looking forward to diving into some juicy conversation topics with you.
Bayo: Hello Lisa, good to be here.
Lisa: Yeah, so I thought there’s so many places we could go, but I thought to open up the conversation—when we were talking via email before the conversation was set up, you wrote that this time calls for a different way of thinking about ourselves and leadership, and you mentioned this concept that I know you’ve written about and spoken about before, which is generative incapacitation, right? And I’d love for you to share with listeners and with me some more about that. What does that mean, generative incapacitation, and how might we think about ourselves in leadership differently in these times?
Bayo: Thank you Lisa. I think this notion or the concept of generative incapacitation strikes at the heart of our understandings of the nature of nature. If we think of nature as this ever-expanding, ever-progressive, linear thing—this trope that is constantly adding things to itself—we’re likely to think that the way to address our most critical problems is skill development.
But there’s something about composting, there are processes in the world that are critical to how we come to materialize—not just we humans, but how everything comes to materialize. When things break down, when things fall apart, when things die, when things fail, you know, there is something about that that is generative, that is productive, that is insightful, that leads to new ways of being in the world.
In fact, this presumption that we can continue to add skills to ourselves, you know, or we can continue to accumulate insights as if we’re just easy, convenient containers of wisdom—that notion leaves way for colonization to happen. It leaves way for, or it breeds the ground upon which toxic cyclical kinds of engagements happen.
So generative incapacitation is about noticing that when things fall down, that’s also a valuable thing. When things fail, it’s an invitation to fail. It’s a way of noticing that these times we’re in, which are critically composed as the Anthropocene, where we cannot be distinguished from the environment, where even our solutions thrown at our critical problems in the environment—racial injustice, climate chaos—just comes back to haunt us, and we seem to be just going around in a tautological hoop. There’s no breaking out, there’s no new nest, there’s no novelty. And not what we call novelty is like a new app—it’s an amplification of experimentation.
This is, for me, what I call generative incapacitation: the sites of alternative power where we learn to listen with the world, where we learn to play and experiment with failure, and where we see where that might lead.
Lisa: Wow. I notice there’s so much provocation in what you’re saying. Even in myself, I notice, you know, I’m guilty myself of preaching this “let’s develop the skills needed for new ways of working and being together.” And I also have talked about that, you know, it’s deeper than that perhaps, and it’s really like a mindset paradigm shift also.
But I also am thinking about, you know, listeners of this podcast and the kind of field that I’m in, and that the pitfalls I think that we can have in this movement of new ways of working, for example, is to read a book, to find a case study, to learn about a new concept, a new model, a new framework, and to want to kind of superimpose that on top of what’s currently existing and thinking that that is going to be the thing that solves things, that shifts things. And what I hear in what you’re saying is that there’s a trap in that, right? That there’s a risk that we’re just adding more, we’re doing more of the same actually, that’s got us to this place, right?
Bayo: A bit more about skill development and how I link that with the social cohesion that often prohibits radical acts of imagination from happening.
A beautiful example is this new thing, supposedly new, on CNN and MSNBC and stations in the United States just rapidly reporting about unidentified aerial phenomena. You probably have come across the news. So UFOs have now become mainstream. I’ve always been a sci-fi nerd at some point.
Every conversation that I’ve witnessed about the phenomenon has people saying, “It’s impossible. Let’s not talk about little green men.” You know, there is something presumptuous there. There is a belittling of the possibility that life could even exist in other worlds. So they start out from that premise: “Let’s not even talk about that. This is probably Russia or China or some Tony Stark kind of guy sitting somewhere. This is not about that, what you think about.”
And I’m thinking about how the need to belong, the need to be rendered intelligible to social connections, often keeps us from tasting the impossible, often keeps us from thinking differently about the world. I’m thinking about all those pilots, the elite trained people, you know, military men and women who fly and witness these events but they don’t talk about it. Now they’re on CNN talking about it, but they never talk about it. Why? Because “I don’t want to be rendered crazy. I don’t want to be seen as weird, and I need to keep on appearances.”
In the same way, I feel that we often think about behavior, which also includes skill development, as anthropocentric. That is, it’s us. So all we need to do is gather to us, and then we can use the skills that are now our property, you know, like critical thinking or something else, futures literacy. We can use these skills and apply to the world at large.
But behavior has never been anthropocentric. Behavior is ecological, right? The organism is not distinct from the environment which upholds the organism. In fact, morphology, the shape of the creature, is not to be distinguished from movement, you know, the organism in movement.
So I’m speaking about processual relational cosmologies and a universe where there aren’t bodies static and still—they’re only becomings, flows, fluid. So if you think about the world that way, in what sense is it possible to think about a skill that Lisa has as if it were a property or an ability or capacity?
If we start to think about agency as diffuse, as atmospheric even, what we tend to call leadership, right? If we think about it as diffuse, and if we think about the environment around us, how that constitutes an architecture of stability, then the problem here—why we keep on going around in circles—isn’t because we don’t have enough skills. It’s a problem, and it’s probably because we’re stuck in an attitude of behaving, in a complex materiality of behaving.
And what we need is a rupture. What we need is a fault line. What we need is a crease, something that breaks us out of that monotonous cyclicity. So generative incapacitation is about building new alliances with the world around us, you know, finding new props, new kinds of bodies which we compose new questions with, which we can conduct new experience events to respond to the complexities around us.
Lisa: Yeah, thank you for elaborating. It comes to mind obviously, is this COVID pandemic that we’re in and the rupture that that’s been. And in my experience, on a kind of very practical level, I’ve noticed, you know, people having Zoom meetings a lot, right? Having Zoom fatigue and that disrupting the way we hold meetings. But going deeper than that, you know, if you’re willing to look, if you’re willing to inquire into this, you can start to look at, well, you know, meetings are really tough now and really heavy, and it’s hard to build connection. But actually, meetings were never really, let’s face it, you know, that human or that generative before either.
But somehow this, this rupture could be an opportunity to address, well, that’s just rethink completely like how we could interact together, you know, Zoom or otherwise, right? And it’s interesting because a lot of people have been asking me, “Do you think COVID is, you know, do you think it’s changing organizations and do you think this is like advancing the movement of, you know, more human, more decentralized ways of working?” And my answer is like, well, yes and no, because what’s sad is that there are organizations and leaders going the other way, right? There are people who are controlling even more, that’s controlling your mouse and your screen. And, you know, “If you don’t come back to the office, that means you’re not engaged.” And we’re seeing the opposite also, people kind of going further back into that command control.
So I’m curious, what from your perspective is how do we create the conditions to recognize that rupture as an opportunity? As a way of, you know, to not miss it or to not react defensively?
Bayo: Well, first of all, I don’t think we create the conditions. We’re part of the creation of the conditions, right? The pandemic hit and we started asking questions about the workplace. Right? Why do I need to travel all this far to go to the office? Why did I do that?
You see, behavior is highly ritualized, and most of the time we’re desensitized to acts of, you know, how we act and how we navigate the world because it’s just normal. It’s just the way we do stuff.
For instance, here in India, the pandemic really shook parents, and people started to ask new questions like, “Why do we need to send kids to school again? Remind me. Where’s the manual? Where’s the memo that we received about why we need to send them to school? What’s the idea?”
So new questions become possible in the midst of topographical shifts which are not human instigated. They are the instigations of large hyper objects. Hyper objects is what Timothy Morton would call it. But these large realities, they’re fluid, they’re excessive, they escape easy measurement. But when they happen, they disturb realities and they make new kinds of movements possible.
But the question is really about, okay, how do we take opportunity? Well, speaking about it is one way to do it. Pedagogical shifts are also instigated by topographical shifts. So speaking about the fact—we’re even speaking this way today through the medium, which is no longer a medium. We’re now pixelated beings in a world of deep fakes and CGI and digital realities and social networks. We are no longer humans apart from our computer systems. We’re now zoomed beings, right? And Zoom can instigate emotional fatigue and all kinds of physical conditions.
So it’s in these times we now have the opportunity to speak in the ways that we do. That doesn’t mean everyone responded the same way. So that’s another fallacy that I would stop. I don’t think it rises to the Supreme level of a fallacy, but just because we speak this way, it doesn’t mean everyone is in the same place. There are axiomatic imperatives where people are, how people are receiving these events, and how people are alchemizing, you know, their own realities.
That means just because we have information, everyone will be in the same place. It might just be that the command control dynamics will proceed for some time or even lengthen and, you know, go ahead and and converge and fold and eat up these, not these novelties that we’re trying to struggle with. And it also could be the case that the more we speak about it, the more people become open to it. And, you know, the pandemic, as resilient as it has proven to be, drives people more and more into asking different kinds of questions. And then that’s when a flight happens, what Deleuze, the French philosopher, calls a flight away from the circle of convergence to stuckness that we’re trying to theorize.
Lisa: I like that. I’m—I feel like now, Bayo, I’m just bringing to you my worries, my big questions about things, because I feel like you can share some wisdom and come at it from a different angle. But, you know, I’m also worried about this movement, this interest, you know, these well-intentioned people like myself and others who are wanting to reimagine organizations, for example, how we work together. And I really want for that to also be inclusive and not—I worry that there’s a danger of reenacting unwittingly the very power dynamics we’re trying to get away from.
For example, if you take away managers and you say, “Hey, we’re a self-managing organization now,” then that privileges and advantages certain types of people if we’re not conscious of that. People have been talking to me about this recently, you know, for example, like if we say, “Oh now everyone—now everyone owns their own career development. So you put yourself forward if you think you’d like to develop your role, or you set your salary or ask for a pay rise.” And again, that’s going to be easier for certain types of people.
And I’m noticing people bumping up against these conversations. They’re about deeper dynamics to do with power. And I wonder what you think about that. And, you know, for example, you’re in India, and many people say to me, “Oh, you know, these new ways of working wouldn’t work in India because it’s too hierarchical.” And yet I’ve come across several organizations that are doing, you know, wonderfully progressive and radical things there. And so there are different cultural starting points. And no one’s sure, but, you know, how can we hold conversations? How can we create an awareness, a consciousness of these things so that we don’t unwittingly, you know, recreate these these things that we’re keen to move away from?
Bayo: I believe these are the moments of deep and widespread—by “wide,” I don’t mean popular, but diffuse and wild—accountability. By accountability, I mean, just like we noticed aspects of ourselves or we are sensitized in the midst of ruptures and chaos and shifts, we suddenly become aware of some aspect of the world that we had, you know, performatively occluded over time. “Oh, we didn’t notice that? Oh, that’s there.” You know, ghosts haunt us all the time, but sanity, so to speak—modern sanity—is premised on shielding out some ghosts and keeping some ghosts right in the center.
I think we are being invited to touch these wider bodies. That our bodies are so wide and diffuse, but we want to touch aspects of it. We want to touch our grieving. We want to touch, for instance, how we are already implicated in suffering and Agamben, how we are already post-nationalists in terms, even though we might have vowed to be something or the other—“I’m Canadian, I’m American, I’m German.” How we are already implicating in the suffering in India, right? That whether we like it or not, a virus connects us all now regardless of our flags or our anthems.
So it’s in this sense we’ve been invited to touch our large bodies, is what I would like to call it—a large, wide, diffuse, volatile bodies—and to account for that is to do the work of noticing how, of course, we’re entangled with the world around us, but also how we exclude aspects of the world around us, how we stop it from, you know, mattering.
What your question here is…remind me of the question again? I’ve tricked stuff into…
Lisa: Yeah, the heart of the question. How to have conversations about these topics because you’re right, it is kind of putting in the room things that perhaps we haven’t noticed before. Like, to give you an example, someone shared with me the other day that some people of color in their organization were sharing that this concept of wholeness, bringing your whole self to work, which is a big part of this movement—that that’s very risky and scary for you if bringing your whole self out of your house doesn’t feel safe, let alone to work.
And so there’s some assumptions baked into—you know, it’s no coincidence that many of the books, management books, and books about these things being written are by white men, for example, from Europe and North America. And I’m just very conscious of assuming that they’re assuming that there is inclusion, or assuming that there is activity by default, when there isn’t. And how to navigate that once we start opening up these conversations, because it’s a complete other realm of, you know, ways of relating to each other and being in dialogue with each other.
Bayo: What your question inspires me to name is something that I’ve been thinking about for some time. I call it, and this is just my secret journal, I call it the fallacy of the whole archive, or the, you can call it the fallacy of ethical totality. You know, it’s this idea that, you know, we can now that we’re sensitized to things, we can get everything. We can include everyone. We can get all our stuff together. And I don’t think that’s the way the world works.
You know, also you mentioned something about hierarchy. Yes, we can be sensitized to the ways power inequities, you know, produce certain kinds of organizational behavior, produces certain kinds of values, you know, irrespective of what we’ve placed on the wall in our office spaces, we can notice that. But this idea that we can now create a utopian arrangement where we have all the good values and all the good behavioral skills and everything in one single place without excluding something else, it hits against some of the philosophies that guide my work.
I speak about complementarity, how in a relational arrangement or universe, to focus on something is to leave out something else. The way they would put it here in India is, “Name the color blinds the eye.” The very act of attending to something occludes other things from happening. Just like when you zoom in with the camera, you lose a panoramic view. And when you gain a panoramic view, you lose details, you lose high definition.
In a sense, the world works that way too. If we focus on hierarchy, then we will create some advantages and some disadvantages. There are always risks in whatever experimental situation we adopt. And if we go the way of self-managing stuff, let us not expect that there won’t be shadows attending that as well, that there will be problems and critiques attending that as well.
And you want to move away from pathologizing, you know, or thinking about hierarchy in categorical terms. It’s hierarchy, it should be dismantled. Or it’s patriarchy, let’s get rid of it. But I know of patriarchal societies even in Africa where people depend on such systems to understand the world and to navigate the world.
So the issue here is not how do we fix everything, you know, bring everything to a whole archive. It’s what can we try today? What kind of coalition can we try today? What kind of software can we ally with today? What kind of digital processes can we play with today? This is the time for accountability, and accountability is a call to play.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s very clarifying. I think it reminds me of—I was re-listening to my conversation with Mickey Kashtan the other week, and she was talking about exclusion criteria, that you know, when we when we start to think about more purposeful ways of coming together, organizing, and so on, sometimes we can have this utopian vision that will include everyone and everyone is equal. And she’s saying that that can be a trap as well, because in trying to include everyone and everything, you can kind of repel the people who are really aligned with that purpose and who want to bring something, and they get frustrated and they leave.
So actually, she was saying that creating exclusion criteria, really clear exclusion criteria, is really helpful and healthy because people can then self-select and say, “Oh, actually, this maybe isn’t the right place for me.” And those who really feel called to attend to that purpose, you know, are able to put their energy into it. So it’s not like pretending, as you say. It’s not like pretending that there aren’t shadow sides or there aren’t things that we’re necessarily going to have to exclude or not focus on, but rather kind of acknowledging that, you know, in a very transparent way.
Bayo: And to take that even deeper down the 12th degree rabbit hole, you know, it’s—even exclusion criteria, you know, are not final-for-all fixes, right? That to adopt that technology is to also, you know, even if I find myself invited into a space because of the clearly articulated exclusion criteria, doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t feel excluded even when I’ve included myself, because myself is not a single essential thing, right? I would be—my identity is nomadic. I would find myself changing in the midst of the engagement, and I would find that different things are calling to me at different times.
So it’s not a—it’s not a fix. And maybe what I want to purchase here, as beautiful as that contribution is, is that we have to let go of the idea of final mastery and that we can fix things once and for all. This is the call to humility. And maybe it also sticks to your lingering question about changing organizations and making organizations more inclusive.
Organizations themselves are beastly, creaturely, you know, entities. They’re becomings as well that transcend and exceed their human operators. So it’s not about our intentions alone, right? Intentions are just the minute aspect of what steers human beings. You want to start noticing cybernetic networks. Cybernetic doesn’t mean artificial intelligence. It means the patterns and arrangements that steer behavior in one way or the other.
So if we start to notice and appreciate that we are part of larger arrangements that exceed our intentions, then we can be maybe at—we can have some peace that, you know, the most we can do, you know, is to do the work we can do and experiment. But it’s not left to us. It’s not up to us to change things. That’s not how—you know, it’s a very centralizing narrative that says it’s up to us to change the world. Who told you that? Our rude, the microbes and bacteria and furniture and creatures and species around us. So, yeah, that’s our response to that.
Lisa: Hmm, yeah. I was confronted with that lesson by Margaret Wheatley, who really shook this idea for me of like wanting to change the world. And instead, you know, thinking about the in a more local context, right? Like, what’s the work I can do with these people right now and in this moment? And doing that with a deeper faith.
And that was sort of a loss for me in some ways, to let that go. And in other ways, very liberating to realize, okay, I don’t have to change the world, but I can do this now here, knowing that, you know, as you say, like with humility, like it’s not on me. I can contribute, but I have a lot of compassion for people listening to this podcast, for example, who are maybe leaders or CEOs or founders in their organization, who, you know, have a passion to want to do good with the people in their organization, to make it more human, more fulfilling, more purposeful, and can sometimes perhaps be impatient or feeling like it’s them that needs to make it happen.
And I think there’s something freeing in what you say—this letting go of mastery as an outcome and letting go of, you know, that you need to be the one that makes this happen, that changes the world, and instead sort of surrendering in a way.
Bayo: I speak from a position of or the perspective of someone who has lived in a part of the world that has over time subsidized the righteousness of the global North, right? The sense of agency and liberality and freedom and individuality, it that’s not essential to citizens of the global North. Right? It is bought and paid for by the suffering in the global South, right?
This idea that we can change the world, we can do things differently is a beautiful gift, right? And I’m not pathologizing that, but I’m saying it does not spring up into the world without tensions. It doesn’t come out without a sense of indebtedness, right? Even the air we breathe, right, is—we’re indebted to the sand in the Sahara Desert blowing across the Atlantic and, you know, and reaching the Amazon forest. Think of that migration process that makes us breathe.
In the same way, the way we think, the designs we make, the desires we have are materially enabled and supported by a vast array of bodies, human and otherwise. So I’m not even saying don’t say, don’t think “I can change the world” or putting a note on your bed that “I will change the world tomorrow” or something. Because I think words are doing other things than just communicating meaning. Words are also stowaways. They’re fugitive.
So it’s not the meaning—the intrinsic meaning—I thought that I’m worried about, because there’s no intrinsic meaning. I’m just worried about forgetting and downplaying the conditions that make such thinking possible. And this is—this brings us back to everything we’ve been talking about. We want to touch the conditions as we’re enabled. Touch the conditions that are opening up around us as a result of the shifts in the world.
We’re not going to arrive and be finally woke. We’re not going to be all inclusive in a final way. No. But if you have passions to do certain things and do other things, and you—and there are sites of failure, there are sites of tensions, there are sites of disappointment. I’m inviting you to think of those sites as resources, not obstacles, right? They are resources that you might want to stay with because they might want to teach you something. There are messages in those places of failure, right?
And I know this because our site of failure today, which is this huge, resilient pandemic, make is a site of deep learning, right? So there’s some kind of post-traumatic growth happening in spite of the millions dying. So that’s my point here. Don’t say “I’m not going to change the world” or say “I’m going to change the world.” It shouldn’t matter that much in the scheme of things where language, it’s just a tiny aspect of how the world constantly matters, right?
But what I’m—what I feel leads to transformation and beautiful new realities is if we get lost, is if we learn how to get lost, if we learn how to lose our way and collide, engage with hitherto pathologized sites of power.
Lisa: Yes, I heard you say this phrase in the podcast, and I—it really resonated with me, that about learning how to get lost. How do we do that? And I’m not, you know, I’m not saying you have some magic answer, but what are some things you’re learning? What can you share for people like me who are thinking, “Oh, how can I—how can I start that journey of learning how to get lost?”
Bayo: Well, since I like to play with mythology and archetypes and story and poetry, permit me to respond this way. I feel if we were to be given—let me just invent some sci-fi technology right here and now and call it the alethiometer. And the alethiometer is some kind of crazy binoculars that if you look through it, you would see the world as it really is. This does not accord in any way with how I see the world, but just for our conversation, you look through the binoculars, you could see the world as it really is, right?
I think if we have that and we pointed it at a human being, instead of the normal anthropomorphized, you know, anthropomorphic forms that we’re used to, we would see chimeric bodies. We would see eight arms or 20 heads or something as crazy and as chaotic as—and look something like the fabled god in Lovecraftian folklore, Lovecraftian stories. We will see something beastly is what I’m trying to say.
Why? I feel our bodies are not as stable as we think they are. And modernity is the paradigm of being found, right? It’s the, fact is the paradigm of being contained. What modernity tries to do well is to enact constraints on our lostness, right? It’s to say, “Lisa, if you want to think about yourself, think of yourself through these parameters. Think of your identity through these words.” And so is the grammar of containment, modernity. It’s the grammar of containment. It’s the syntax of continuity and permanence.
In that sense, if we relax some of the constraints around us and stop—us doing relaxing—we might notice that we are always lost, right? It’s not a new thing to undertake. We’re always lost. We’re constantly navigating stuff. We’re constantly in place-making rituals, right?
The invitation to get lost is not something new, is not something to take on. “Let’s go get lost.” It’s the complex ways that the world instigates new forms of engagement and new forms of navigation and new forms of questions, like we’ve been speaking about.
Getting lost is what Deleuze would call becoming monstrous. The reason why I started out with the figure of the monster, it’s the “common monstrous.” He says, “To think is to become monstrous.” And there are—they’re beautiful texts that speak in literature, academic and otherwise, to speak about methodocentrism and how we conduct research and gather data only to feedback into our anthropocentric loops.
What would it be like to listen, you know, to lose our way as we conduct research? Then we might happen upon the strange. But we have to risk losing cohesion and intelligibility, or we will not find new ways of naming columns or seeing ourselves or happening upon transformed landscapes.
So losing our way is about new practices that allow us to stay with the trouble of our ongoing disappearance, right? And ritualizing that and staying with the trouble of that.
Lisa: Yeah. Thank you for for helping me see the very way I phrased that question was like, “Oh, tell me the skills I need to develop to learn how to be lost!”
Bayo: We do that all the time. I’m there too. No one is, you know, has it all together.
Lisa: I feel like I would kick myself if I didn’t take the opportunity—because another passion of mine is looking at education and learning and how we reinvent that. And I think there’s so many parallels between organizations and education. And I’ve read that you are unschooling your children, and I’m curious to hear more about that. What does that mean?
Bayo: Unschooling for my wife, and my—our children, and me is this vocation to listen. Is the invitation to perform parenting, which my wife calls “transparenting,” in a way that might allow the new to happen.
We were professors in the university, my wife and I, and we kind of bonded, among other things, with the understanding that higher education was getting in the way of learning. It might seem—it might seem, you know, like a crazy thing to say, but it seemed people were learning better, at least asking creative questions and doing more creative things outside of the environments that were designed to do that.
We were very adventurous lecturers and academics. We wanted to do crazy things that disturbed the uniformity of the environment where we were teaching and learning and growing. And every time we hit this brick ivory wall, this ivory tower syndrome, it was “When you’re writing a paper, do it exactly this way. If you’re referencing, do it exactly this way.”
Rituals are good, right? But there is a threshold to—and rituals become incarcerating. They become a prison cell, right? And so we kept on noticing how, even our students, they came to class and their learning was deeply instrumentalized, right? And they were being forced to survey, to write mock surveys, “Mark your professors.” Here’s a new PowerPoint slide system. These are the new benchmarks and doing new terms and terminologies. And the students did not want to be there.
And we tried it one day. We went to class and we said, “We’re going to do this in our respective departments.” She was in biology and I was in psychology. And we just said, “You know, how many of you, if given the chance, you know, to do something different, how many of you would do something different, leaving the university all together, if maybe I gave you a couple of bucks, you know, some money to do something, anything you want?” And every single person in the class raised their hands. In fact, they got the real gist of being at the university. Just get a degree, gain access into a very stylized, ritualized, highly ritualized way of becoming in the world.
So we decided to become parental activists, and we’re still struggling with this. It’s a lifelong struggle to treat the world as abundant with learning already, abundance with learning opportunities, and then to see ourselves as soft curators of learning spaces and unlearning spaces where our kids with us could ask questions, could frame our own research agenda, could embark on this together. Not to treat our children as adults in the making or to treat them as philosophers in their own right, right? And to open ourselves to their questions, which we usually frame as stupid, right? To listen to them.
Maybe the world is using kids, using—you know, using kids—I don’t know if that’s the right language, but maybe the world is using kids to invite us to fall apart. Maybe kids are part of the generative incapacitation we’ve been speaking about. So yeah, we call it unschooling. Sometimes we call it—I don’t know, we have many names for it, but the idea is to get lost.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s very fitting. I didn’t know it was going to beautifully tie in with all the things we’ve been talking about already. I like it. Thank you for sharing. It’s kind of a bit of a mission for me to seek out examples and stories around the world of how people are doing schooling, learning differently with young people. And this, as I said, there’s so many parallels, I think, with leadership and what we’ve been talking about, you know, asking questions, listening, and that kind of way of being is very different to what we’re used to, I think.
So I guess, in seeing as we’re maybe entering into a phase of wrapping things up and tying things up in a nice way, what wisdom or what provocations could you share with listeners of this podcast who are on their own journeys in terms of, you know, themselves as leaders, as colleagues, as parents, as human beings? I don’t know. I’m making this too big now, but what would you like to share with people listening that you think might contribute to them?
Bayo: In 1945, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions changed the world, you know, forever. It was an end-of-the-world moment. It was the beginning of a world alone with creation. It was destruction, not just in the felt and real eradication of, you know, bodies in those cities, but in, you know, each with an intergenerational bomb, actually. It altered bodies around the planet, so much so that when some researchers looked in a couple of years back, you know, not too long ago, I believe maybe decades ago, maybe in the 90s or in the 2000s, I can’t quite remember the details, but when they looked and they measured the level of carbon-14, which is emitted by that explosion, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they found trace elements of carbon-14 in babies that were being born in our time.
That is, everyone, including you, you and me, are participants, unwilling, unwitting participants in something that is supposedly done with, right? I feel we are in the midst of explosions today. The pandemic might not be a military explosion. It’s an epidemiological, viral explosion, but it’s also an existential explosion of some kind. And I think shrapnel from this explosion has lodged in our bodies in ways. It’s never distributed equally, right? Those of us, those people who are far away from the epicenter of the blast did not feel as much, you know, the weight as much. But those who were closer died or became cancerous bodies, right?
In the same way, we are affected by these moments. We may not be able to articulate the language. You may not even register in conscious awareness, but we are definitely altered by this cognitive spiritual reset.
My invitation to people is to slow down. And by slowing down, I don’t mean do things slowly or or think about doing things or take yoga or go on a vacation. I mean, find the others—in the places, in the wounds where the shrapnel of today’s large hyper-objective shifts have pierced through your skin, those are the opportunities for us to shape-shift, right? In order for a body to shape-shift, it needs a wound. If it’s complete and tidy, shape-shift is impossible, right? So in order to shape-shift, it needs an opening with which to conduct the transformation.
So I would invite people at those sites of failure, those places where you think of yourself as inadequate, those places in your organizational settings where things don’t add up, right? Things don’t add up, or you’re witnessing ongoing failure, and there’s no way to think about it. You’re throwing solutions at it. You’re throwing money at it. It might just be that the failure is a gift. It might just be that the failure is an invitation.
So when I say slow down, I’m asking us to go beyond the linear temporality of solutionism, linear temporality of arrival, and to think differently about the world around us by engaging in a new politics of humility. And maybe by then it might happen upon new ways of being empowered with the world that might not be successful. It might not tally up with our standards of success. But I think the world, as it is right now, needs bold failures in order to become different. That’s what I’ll say.
Lisa: Thank you. Gosh, you have such a wonderful way with language. It’s really a joy to witness. You’re really a poet. Thank you so much for taking time and for sharing these thoughts, for challenging me, for exploring these ideas together. I really enjoyed it, and I think listeners will really appreciate what you’ve shared.
Bayo: Thank you very much.
