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Episode Transcript
Lisa: So Jon, welcome to the Leadermorphosis podcast. Thanks for being here.
Jon: Thank you for having me.
Lisa: Well, congratulations on the book first of all. It’s been doing the rounds in all of my circles of friends and networks and so on, so hopefully it’s resonating with people in your circles too.
Jon: It does seem to be. It’s a slightly curious experience, these aspects of this - the book’s out in the world and I could never quite believe that as many people are talking about it as they are now, even though your hopes are still far in advance - you’ll be everywhere, but you expect relatively little. No, it’s great. I think what I’m most pleased about is the fact that I think I’ve been able to penetrate some of the places like McKinsey who got into the McKinsey Reading Guide, it got into the FT, I managed to do something with the World Economic Forum. So I think there is something of this where it’s like we’ve been building all of these ways of working - so many of us have been working in different ways for quite a long time, and it’s felt like it hasn’t quite penetrated sometimes. I think that would be my personal frustration alongside others. And I think part of the reason I wrote the book and the way I did - sort of a little bit frothy in some ways - was to try and actively try and be in some of those spaces and be heard in that place. So I’m excited by how it’s going. It could still be doing an awful lot more, but yeah, thank you.
Lisa: So for the benefit of listeners, can you say something about what is the central message of the book and what do you want it to do?
Jon: The central message really is that there is another way of thinking about who we are as human beings that leaders and people in positions of power in the existing system need to be able to see. I think the way I would sort of express my diagnosis is that many of those sorts of people can see only two possible futures. One I would call the consumer future, which is a continuation of the world we’ve been living in for the last 80-odd years and a continuation of that logic - at best a refinement of it, at worst a kind of turbo-charging of it. And the only other possible future they see is what I call the subject future, as in subjects of the king, which is essentially the authoritarian future.
And the result of only being able to see those two possibilities is that too many of them feel like their role is to defend the status quo against the collapse into authoritarianism. And actually, the status quo is indefensible - it’s just collapsing. It’s reached the end of its useful life, if it ever had one.
And so what I’m trying to name, and therefore kind of make more tangible, is what I call the citizen future, which is a future that is built around a strategy that says actually we need everyone on the pitch. Like, all of us are smarter than any of us, and so the way to face into the challenges of our time is actually to tap into the ideas and energy and resources of everyone. And I’m quite deliberately trying to put that set of ideas in a frame and in a way - I know I’m not the first to talk about these sorts of things by any stretch of the imagination, but I think perhaps the contribution I’m making that might be to some degree unique is to be putting it in a frame and in language that tries to meet those who are in positions of power in the existing system where they are and open up a different future.
Lisa: And I really like this idea, and I know in the book you reference people like Donella Meadows and these ideas of paradigms and that kind of constrains and enables what’s possible in terms of the change that we want to see in the world. So can you say something about the citizen future? If I want to activate my citizen mindset or my citizen story, what does that look like?
Jon: I mean, the simplest definition I offer of what it means to be a citizen is to step into your own agency. I talk about the idea of committing to a domain that you believe that you can contribute to, finding the others who care about that domain, and figuring out what you want to do together. And critically, the complement to that is inviting others into their agency as well. It’s not just stepping into your own agency, it’s creating the space for others. That is what it means to be citizen, I think.
And I think perhaps it’s useful to distinguish that from a kind of consumer mindset, which is one which comes from a place of trying to do for people. Even at its best, it’s one that - the language of service, I think - and maybe this is one of the nuttier aspects of the book, chewier rather than crazier, but one of the cheerier aspects of the book is this idea that actually the construct of service isn’t necessarily helpful. It’s one that ultimately ends up keeping power in its existing place.
So my favorite story in the research for the book was the transformation of the Taiwanese government over the last 10 years. And I won’t sort of go into it in all depth here - you’ll have to read the book, my friends - but the sort of culmination of that story was, in my mind at least, the way the Taiwanese faced into the COVID pandemic. And what they did was they characterized their response by three principles: fast, fun, and fair. But they did things like created challenge prizes for people to create apps that would track face mask availability and so on. But they even set up a phone line where any citizen could ring in with their ideas for how the country’s response could be better.
And the thing about that mode is - in a mode of service, it’s like “we will do for you, we’ll keep you safe, we’ll make sure that your life isn’t too disrupted.” In a citizen mode, it’s actually not about service, it’s about inviting in. It’s about acknowledging the limitations of what any one institution or agent can do and saying actually the only way to face the challenges of our time is to face them together. And I think that’s quite a challenging message because so much of the kind of work on what it means to be good, what it means to work for change in the world comes from this kind of paradigm of service, I think. And what I would describe - I think the paradigm of service is the paradigm of the consumer.
Lisa: I think oftentimes on this podcast I’m talking to guests about how there is, in the world of work - not just in the world of work but particularly in organizations - there’s this dynamic, this kind of old paradigm that’s kind of parent-child, where if I’m someone with power like a manager, then I’m kind of controlling and motivating and steering meetings and driving strategy and so on. And if I’m someone who doesn’t have power in the organization, I’m kind of passive, I’m a consumer. I’m oftentimes literally a consumer of meetings - the number of meetings that we suffer through because we don’t realize that we have the power to say something about the quality of that meeting, or that the purpose isn’t clear or whatever.
So I think, as you say, there are different names for these things, but I think it’s really powerful, kind of confronting these automatic ways of seeing things that sometimes stop us from really questioning “Well, is that true?” or “Can something be done about that?” and “Can I do something about that?”
Jon: I mean, really playfully, I quite like these sort of dynamics that they talk about - adults who are adult and adult child and these sorts of things. But playfully, I sometimes think we need to actually go to more kind of child to adult. Not just adult to adult - the idea of actually saying “I don’t know how to do this” is incredibly - it’s not really child to adult, but you get where I’m coming from - it’s like there’s a kind of “I need help.” That is an incredibly important thing for leaders to do in this moment in time, I think - to acknowledge the limits of their own agency, our own agency, and know that we can only do it with others.
I was really struck - it’s just one of the many deeply painful moments that you have at the moment - when I saw Tiwish Coffey on breakfast news the other day talking about what people can do in terms of the environment and talking about disposable cups. And I was like, what I would give for someone in a position of leadership in our society to say this is huge. This is important to do what we can as individuals, but actually we’re facing huge challenges that we don’t know what our society is going to look like in 15, 10, even 5, even a year’s time potentially.
Like, 33 million people have been displaced in Pakistan. Imagine someone being sufficiently respectful of our agency and the contribution that we are capable of making to actually name that and say “I don’t know how to do this, and I’m gonna need you all to do it with me.” And I’m blasting up to the macro of kind of UK politics, but bring that into organizations. I think there’s a real dynamic, as we progress through our careers and rise into positions that might be called leadership in a kind of structural sense, where we sort of get there by having the answers. And to flip that into actually having the questions, I think, is a really important shift.
I’m really conscious talking to you and all the wonderful people you’ve had on this podcast that I’m saying in quite simplistic terms some of what others have said much more richly and much more intelligently, probably. But I think maybe, like I say, some of what I’m bringing to this is just bringing it down a peg into some language that can maybe just take hold a little more. I hope.
Lisa: Totally, and in the book you talk about the three principles of participatory organizations, for example. So I don’t know if that’s what you’re referring to when you’re saying language that’s helping kind of ground it in something that people can apply or play around with. So what would you say to people listening who are like, “Right, I want to create a citizen organization or a citizen mindset in my team. How could I do that?”
Jon: Yes, I mean, I sometimes joke - so as you know from having read the book, I spent the first 10 years of my career in the advertising industry. And sometimes I joke that - obviously went on quite a deep journey of self-rejection and rediscovery in the process of getting to the place where you write a book called “Citizens” and explicitly decry the consumer mindset. You can imagine I had some fairly uncomfortable times.
But I sometimes joke that like you can take the boy out of advertising, but you can’t take the alliteration out of the boy. The three principles of participatory organizations: purpose, platform, and prototype. And I’m very proud of that step that I’m also mildly ashamed of.
But it is explicitly - as so much of my work is - it’s an explicit hack on a structure that comes from the consumer story. So the consumer story, when it took shape in the post-war period, we built all sorts of institutions around it - the UN, the EU, the NHS - but we also built all sorts of mental models and structures and processes. And one of the most pervasive is what’s called the marketing mix, which is the four P’s of marketing: product, price, promotion, and placement. And these four P’s have been - they were first published in a textbook I think in 1950, but they’re still in every single MBA course that I’ve yet managed to find. And the textbook is in its 32nd edition or something.
And the problem is that even when we try and think differently, try and work differently, if the only mental models that we have still derive from the old story, the gravitational pull back to those ways of thinking and working is almost irresistible. So quite seriously, under the three P’s of participatory organizations - more P’s than you can throw a stick at - is to say, what if we had a mental model that could hold us and support us into thinking of our organizations differently?
So each of the three P’s has a question. The purpose is: what is this organization really trying to do in the world that’s so big that it needs people to help it do it, and that it can’t do it for people? And we might want to touch on Patagonia, which I know is where you and I first connected.
The platform principle is about: okay, so then what structures and processes - if you need people to help you do it, what structures and processes do you create to make it meaningful and joyful to participate in that purpose?
And then prototype is really just saying: you can’t flip a utopian switch and transform a whole thing overnight, but what you can do is find where the energy is, find where it’s already trying to emerge in the organization, and feed it and help it grow.
And the Taiwanese story I’ve already mentioned is a really good example on the prototype thing. That whole transformation story started in 2012 with a quasi-authoritarian government trying to rush through a trade bill that would have sacrificed huge amounts of power to the Chinese Communist Party. And within four years, it had completely transformed, but started with some very small experiments. So when you work in these sort of iterative ways, that’s so much more powerful than what gets lost in sort of “agile” and these sorts of language. It is genuinely a way to build change very quickly.
So the three P’s - that is really an offer of a mental model to leaders who want to reshape their organizations from whatever sector, as a sort of mental model to think with, to say how can I involve people in what I’m trying to do in the world?
Lisa: You share a number of examples of organizations and case studies either that you researched for the book or that you’ve worked with. What are some of your favorite applications of these ideas?
Jon: I do really love The National Trust as an organization, and I worked there for a little while when I came out of the advertising industry and was part of a lot of exciting stuff there. And really it was largely about rescuing, in a sense, the organization from the consumer paradigm, because in the mid to late 90s, early 2000s, it had become essentially a visitor attraction business with a conservation charity kind of hidden somewhere in the background.
And even when I first entered the building, I remember that the two parts of the organization at the headquarters were on different floors - conservation staff on one floor and the visitor marketing staff on a different one. And the work we did was really about saying, well, using the - I hadn’t, this was where I formed a lot of these ideas - it was about bringing these to bear. And the question “what are we really trying to do here?” got us the answer: actually build the relationship between people and place, build the relationship between people and the idea of beauty and the importance of nature - not just sell days out in order to fund looking after those things in spite of people.
And that manifested in some lovely work way back then, like a campaign - one of my proudest things - a campaign called “50 things to do before you’re 11 and three quarters.” And the joyful story of that is when it was first in development, it was actually a very prosaic marketing campaign called “Get Outdoors with the National Trust” - like, tell people we don’t just own big old houses.
And stepping back and actually talking to the conservation teams at the Trust, we dug up research that found that if you develop a personal connection with nature by the age of 12, then you’re more likely to be pro-environmental later in life. And we found also that the percentage of children who were having those formative experiences was dropping. And we also found, by talking to people who were out on the ground at National Trust properties, who had previously been kind of looked down on as sort of the little people in the little jobs, that they were already doing den building and tree climbing and this sort of stuff, sort of outside of their paid hours. So we wrapped all that together, and it became this - and then crowdsourced the list of what people thought should be on it - and built this thing.
And now one of my favorite things that I’m working on right now is in many ways a legacy of this. And obviously now working from outside the Trust, but we’ve been - my organization, the New Citizenship Project, has been part of bringing together the RSPB, the WWF, and the National Trust to basically hold the space for a crowdsourcing of a citizen-driven policy framework on the natural environment. We’re calling it “The People’s Plan for Nature.” And it’s been open for an open idea gathering phase, and now we’re going into a citizens’ assembly phase where there’ll be 100 randomly selected people representing the national population who’ll digest and take the inputs and call witnesses from all sides, including the arguments against - I mean, there are not many arguments outrightly against nature preservation, but there are plenty of arguments for there being competing interests, and they will be heard in this process. And that will - I think there are some very exciting things coming in the spring that mean I think that could become quite noisy as well.
But this sort of work - really, the person - I’m going back to Taiwan again, which is a favorite of mine - that I interviewed the Digital Minister Audrey Tang a few times for research for the book. And in one of the conversations I said, “The people of Taiwan must really trust the government for you to be able to work in the ways you’ve told me about, you know, the crowdsourcing and so forth.” And the response was, “We don’t want people to trust the government. We want people to hold government to account. What we want, and what I’m devoting my working life to, is government trusting people.”
Lisa: Hmm.
Jon: I made that noise - but it’s this wonderful thing of like, “Oh right” - like, trust is reciprocal. Trust is not something we can just measure and say “Oh, the people ought to trust the politicians more - that’s where this is really going wrong” or “The people ought to trust business more” or whatever. It’s like no, business has to trust and respect people more, government has to trust and respect people more. That means process design, it means thinking very carefully, it means real facilitation skills.
But what it doesn’t mean is - this is where the Patagonia thing that you and I connected over came up, I think, because everyone was celebrating. There was a big sort of moment of celebration of Patagonia going - putting their governance into a charitable structure. And I just - the problem for me is that it’s still in this frame of - there’s a kind of misanthropy in there. There’s a sort of “we know how to save the world” and it’s been in a lot of their language.
And don’t get me wrong - just as I’m not saying individual action on climate isn’t important, I’m also not saying that Patagonia is a terrible organization. They’re obviously wonderful and we could do with more like them. And imagine if we could get to a place where actually they were harnessing and building the energy of people as participants in nature, as and celebrating the idea that we are nature, and actually putting their governance - if we can crowdsource a policy framework on the natural environment with a citizens’ assembly, what if Patagonia had a citizens’ assembly as part of its governance structure? What if they were cooperatively owned? What if they weighted indigenous peoples in that cooperative structure?
I mean, all of these things are possible and are starting to be experimented with. And it just - I saw this sort of excitement about this moment and I was like, “Wow” - I’m sure we can do more than that. And I think the nub of the more we can do is this idea of seeing people as sources of ideas and energy to be unleashed, not as - there’s this crazy language in Yvon Chouinard’s book, the founder of Patagonia’s book, “Let My People Go Surfing,” where he says something along the lines of like, “Humans are the only animals that soil their own nest.” And I’m like, wow, like, do we really have to go there?
And I think my take is that the only way we will really be able to get through the challenges of this time - and they’re really massive - but they if we is is starting from love of humanity and love of nature. We can’t allow those to be counterposed to one another, to become competing with one another. So yeah, that’s - I can’t even remember what the original question was.
Lisa: There’s so many things that resonate with me in what you’re saying. And I’m also remembering in the book that you talked about the kind of allure of the heroic leader also. And I think that that Patagonia example - and there’s so many of them, even in an organization that’s as purpose-driven as Patagonia - we’re still sort of stuck in this paradigm that the owner is doing this noble thing and deciding what’s best and so on. And it’s not really challenging that idea.
And I think there’s a trap and a danger that we do that also on this podcast when I’m interviewing people, thought leaders and these visionary founders of organizations like Jos de Blok from Buurtzorg or whatever. And it’s like, I really don’t want us to get preoccupied on the person. And you talk about that we need anti-heroes, and I think there’s something in that about starting with humility, as you said, like “I don’t have the answers.” Maybe I have some power and I have the beginnings of a vision, but it’s together that we’re gonna figure this out, and really tapping into the full potential of people instead of getting stuck in this sort of hero worshiping. But it’s so ingrained in us, I think.
Jon: It is, and I mean, this is quite a live thing for me in my own quite small and humble way. The alphabet needs a lot more letters before I enter the list of celebrity in any state! But there is a thing of - and also just to acknowledge really openly - I’m six foot, white, male, straight, able-bodied, like pretty much every privilege in the book. And as a result of that, I am - I tend to be invited more easily into some of these positions and spaces than others might.
And I think when I’m being invited to go to the World Economic Forum or whatever, you’re like, “What?” And you start to see it - you really sort of need to believe your own hype in order to just be there and be able to say anything. And yet you have to keep suppressing that belief so you don’t disappear into it. And it’s - I feel it quite viscerally sometimes. It’s like, tiny violins, right? My life is hard - no!
But the thing I try to do, and at my best I think I do do, is use the spaces that I’m allowed into and invited into to open the door and pass the mic and platform, rather than take space and oxygen. We spent a lot of time - well no, actually we didn’t spend a lot of time, it just came pretty naturally - that the references in the book tend to be to women and people of color, in a way that my sort of reading up until the age of about 30 was largely white men. But the most important voices that I’m trying to bring through in the book are people like Edgar Villanueva, the guy who wrote “Decolonizing Wealth,” and Donella Meadows.
And it was really fascinating to then find myself on the list of the McKinsey’s top five as like Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Francis Fukuyama, and me. And I was like, “Oh my God, what am I doing here?” But to be there and to bring those voices through, I think is - and to this anti-hero thing, I think it is - what I mean by that is not that we don’t need leaders, and I’m learning about that all the time. Not that we don’t need to go into those spaces, but the mode of operation once in those spaces is fundamentally different.
And again, Audrey Tang is a real hero of mine - anti-hero of mine. The words that she talks about - herself as a channel. Says, “I’m not here to stand for any particular agenda. I’m here to enable and facilitate and be a channel, and my only agenda is to ensure that as many people as possible are involved.” And I think that’s sort of close to what I mean by an anti-hero.
I also - the other character in the Taiwan story, and this maybe takes me back to your original thing of it’s hard - there’s a sort of parallel character in the Taiwan story, which is the old speaker of the parliament, who really opened the door. When power shifted in Taiwan, basically there’s a hacker movement who built a whole alternative way of thinking about government - Audrey was part of that - and then a critical moment came in a mass protest, an Occupy-style protest. And the speaker of the parliament essentially validated the position of the protesters.
And so if one part of the anti-hero phenomenon I think is occupying the space traditionally of a hero but doing it in a different way, the other part is those quiet heroes, like this guy, Speaker Wang Jin-ping, who - in a moment when it would have been far easier for him and probably better for his career to have rejected the new story that was surging and to have claimed his own powers and rescued the state from this threat - instead said, “This is what we need to move towards. This is what democracy looks like. These people are doing the good work.” And in naming that, he’s not become famous, and frankly, he wouldn’t make a great interview candidate - lovely man, but wouldn’t make a great interview candidate. And that’s part of the problem, because these instincts of humility don’t make great storytellers sometimes.
Lisa: Yeah, I do find that too, actually, when I reach out to people to have on the podcast - that the real kind of humble leaders that I really want to have are the ones that often say no because they’re not egotistical or they’re not confident speakers.
I wonder, what else are you learning? Because one of the things that’s at once kind of reassuring and also kind of frightening, as you said right at the top of the conversation, is that we’re kind of in this consumer story now, but there’s this threat that we might go backwards to the subject story, which is scary. But there is also a possibility that we can move towards this citizen story because we have moved stories before - that shift has happened.
And at the same time, I think you talk in the book about that there are pitfalls along the way, and we’ve also talked a bit about almost like false friends or false idols along the way. So what are some things to watch out for for those of us who are interested in kind of changing the story?
Jon: I think in terms of these pitfalls and these traps, some of them are really about mistaking the individual for the problem, I think is a big one. And I mean, in this country, we’re in the UK, we can see that - it’s like, you think Boris Johnson is the problem, you think Liz Truss is the problem, you think - and the problem is that it just gets transferred and transferred.
And I think that in itself stands for another, a sort of broader, perhaps part of a broader set of bear traps that are about mistaking the individual context, the individual symptoms for the broader context. So it’s not actually perhaps even just - the way I would describe the situation we have in our politics is that what we’re stuck in around the world is what I would describe as a conception of consumer democracy, which reduces democracy and equates it to the concept of elections, and says that our only agency is to choose between people to give our power to every few years, and even goes as far as saying we should make that choice on the basis of our own self-interest - which manifesto best matches your self-interest is sort of the frame of the debate around election time.
And actually, there’s no party that I mean, I can’t think of one pretty much anywhere in the world that’s really commensurate with the scale of the challenges, that’s gonna - and certainly one that’s been able to build a mandate at that level. And yet, there is clearly a need to face into those challenges at that sort of political level. So arguably, we need a different form of politics.
And I think I’m part of a new organization called Democracy Next that’s working with some of these modes, and I’ve already talked about citizens’ assemblies. But that, I think, stands for a kind of citizen democracy that is about saying it’s not about whether this particular person is bad. It’s not even about whether the category of politicians is bad. It’s not even about whether - it’s the whole system and how we reinvent that. So I think that’s part of it.
I think the other thing I would draw attention to is the pitfall of, frankly, the pitfall of despairing. And I love the way Rebecca Solnit talks about this - I don’t know if you’ve had her on the podcast, I didn’t see her on the list, but she’d be another one. She’s a wonderful writer with some incredible phrases. She talks about hope beautifully, but but in this context, what I’m thinking of is she has this lovely phrase - she talks about “stealing the teddy bear of despair from the loving arms of the left” in particular, which I won’t necessarily get into left and right, but like, the teddy bear of despair is a really - I think a really almost pungent phrase.
And I think the greatest trap of our moment in time is the attraction of the chasm. And sometimes I think of it in my mind as we’re sort of standing on the edge of this chasm and wondering which rocks we’re gonna hit on the way down, instead of building the freaking bridge. And there is a self-fulfilling prophecy to this.
And I think that the big message of the book, the big message of all of my work really, is it is true that we are in collapse. It is true, and denying that or pretending it’s not there is really unhelpful. And it is also true that there is an emergence and a potential and a possibility. And we need to say both of those things, because if you don’t acknowledge the collapse, then you lose trust. In this spirit of like - because you’re not respecting people enough to acknowledge what we all know, right? We all know.
And yet if you only talk about the collapse, then you’re also denying the agency of what’s possible. And those of you watching the video will see the hand signals, but the collapse story actually obscures and crushes the emergent story. And I think that’s a lot of where we are as well.
So I think in this moment of at least potential transition, of at least some kind of deep shift that is definitely happening, there are traps that are about misdiagnosing, but there are also traps that are about becoming sort of disaster-obsessed.
Lisa: Another metaphor that you share in the book that comes from, I forget their name, the Turkish novelist, about the reef and the wreck - something about that?
Jon: You must have AJ on here - she’s one of the curious, weirder experiences of the last six months. Having written the book, AJ Tamil Curry, this Turkish writer and activist, has long been a kind of literary hero of mine, and we’ve sort of become friends, which is really odd. I keep being like, “You’re amazing,” she’s like, “Shut up.” But she has just a wonderful way with words.
And one of the metaphors in her book “Together” - she frames it as ten choices to create a better future, a better now actually. And she frames the choice of the reef over the wreck, and she tells this lovely story of how an old decommissioned plane was sunk off the coast of Turkey in order to create a new reef. And she has this lovely image of octopuses making love in the cockpit, which I would never get away with!
But what she’s saying is that this is what our democracy, what our society might be like. We have to both acknowledge that it is a wreck, and we have to accept the task of building around it a whole new kind of system and ecosystem.
Lisa: Yeah, it’s such a powerful image. And to me, it makes me think of like, when it can seem a bit overwhelming of where to start, it’s always reassuring to me to sort of say, well, start with where you are and what you’ve got and who you’ve got. And that’s the only place you can start. So I really liked this idea of this image of the wreck and the reef growing around it.
Jon: If I may, one of my favorite - sort of building on that in a way - one of my favorite concepts from the research for the book, which I’m thinking about more and more at the moment, is this - one of the few white men who I cite - there’s a guy called Barry Mason, originally a family therapist, who developed this idea of safe uncertainty.
And I think as a construct for leaders, I think this maybe is a really important one to share. I’m certainly finding it more and more helpful. His diagnosis was that anyone who comes for therapy tends to be in one of two mindsets. They’re either unsafe uncertain - “I don’t know what to do, I’m in panic, I’ve got no orientation.” Or they’re unsafe certain - “I’m bad and I know I am.”
And he says what they think they want, and what the sort of conditioning of our time is to offer them, is safe certainty - “Tell me what to do to fix it.” And his argument is that there is no such thing as safe certainty, and anything that pretends to it will only suppress the deeper problem, the deeper challenge.
And he says instead, we need to make a distinction between the concepts of safety and of certainty, and try and create safe uncertainty. So in the context of the therapist, he’s saying that what the therapist has to do is come alongside and not say “I will fix you,” but say, “You’re not alone. I’m beside you. We’ll figure out a way forward, and we don’t know exactly what that will look like, but we’ll take those steps.”
And I think as an analogy to the role of leader in any kind of organization, being able to say - again, it’s back to this thing, it’s really the same point again - acknowledging the dangers and the uncertainty, but offering the safety of community and of support and of acknowledgment, and saying that it is the best hypothesis we have that we will get through this best if we’re all on the pitch.
And so that thing of safe uncertainty - I relate it to your thing. Sometimes it can feel like we’re adrift without points of orientation, and I feel that - we all feel that, I’m sure. And to say, okay, I don’t have to - because the scary thing about that is that it leaves you in a space where giving up, or attaching to someone who offers a simplistic answer, both become very attractive.
So finding the ability to say, okay, I’m not going to deny the existence of this stuff. I am going to accept that I have to start from where I am. But I am also gonna say that there can be better than this, and we can - and my only certainty that I will take, will be - and I’ll take safety from that - will be that we will do this best if we do it together, if we find ways to tap into the best of everyone in order to do it. So I’m really loving that idea of safe uncertainty at the moment.
Lisa: I love that too, and I’ve interviewed Amy Edmondson for the podcast who’s famous for her work on psychological safety, and I find that often gets misinterpreted as psychological comfort. And it’s not about that - it is about kind of confronting the truth, the reality, and at the same time, yes, kind of holding space for people to be able to say “I don’t know,” to ask questions, to challenge the status quo. But it’s not comfortable, it’s not cozy because that’s kind of paternalistic again. That’s the kind of consumer story again, right?
Jon: Exactly, yeah. There’s so much, and this - I haven’t yet seen it happen too much with the ideas I’m putting forward, but I’m sure it will do - the kind of co-option of these things, the sort of naturalization almost into the consumer story, because it’s a deeply resilient thing.
And I think - this is again an edge of my learning. As I’m sure you kind of want to shut me up, I talk too much! But the edge of the learning is, when are these ideas becoming co-opted? When are they - if I work with a big business on involving their customers in seeking and finding answers to the challenges they’re facing, how do I judge where the line is between fully building agency in service of transforming the way the corporate sector works, and becoming co-opted and creating the phenomenon of citizen-washing, which I’m sure would be possible?
And I think, again, you have to sort of sit on the line of the discomfort of those things. Ultimately, we don’t know. And I think this maybe to the Rebecca Solnit - her sort of most powerful words, in my view, were her definition of hope. She said, optimism is the belief that things will be all right no matter what we do. Pessimism is the belief that things will be rubbish no matter what we do - I’m slightly paraphrasing. And she says both excuse us from action. And she says hope lies in the spaciousness of uncertainty, in the very fact of not knowing, and that the future is unknowable and therefore is shapable.
And she has those lovely equation - she says hope equals clarity plus imagination. The clarity to see the troubles of the world for what they are, and the imagination to see how they might be different and that they’re not immutable, they’re not inevitable.
And I try and hold that - I’m having a good day today, I think! But sometimes I can’t, and that’s kind of okay too. But the way I try and hold it is with a little question I always ask myself: what would you do today if you really believed in yourself and in those around you? Because that starting point of belief - belief in humanity, belief in others, belief that it’s the creation of the conditions that is the task - I think feels really important to me.
Lisa: I love that. Well, in kind of wrapping up our conversation, are there any other words that you’d like to share with listeners who are now inspired, if they weren’t already, to kind of embark on their own citizen-oriented journeys?
Jon: Buy the book! No, I didn’t mean that, sorry - like I say, you can take the boy out of advertising…
No, I think my offer of a profound ending has already been and gone, but I think my more present one would just be - find joy in it. We have to find joy in this work, because otherwise we won’t be able to do it. So if that means doing it by laughing at yourself, as I generally try to and create plentiful material for, then so be it.
Lisa: Thank you so much for sharing all of your thoughts, and I really enjoyed the book. And yeah, I do encourage people to get the book if they haven’t read it already.
Jon: Very good. Thank you for having me.
