14 Sep 2006
Meg Wheatley on Energy Descent Planning – Part Two.
**Interview with Meg Wheatley – Schumacher College. Wednesday, 14th June 2006. Part Two.**
**You have written that “to create better health in a living system, you need to connect it with more of itself�. My background is teaching permaculture, and that’s a basic principle in permaculture as well….**
Yes, that comes from biology…
**…but I wondered whether beyond the obvious things like networking people together as much as possible, how else might that principle be applied?**
It relates to the question “who else should be here?�, that you’re always looking to expand the web of connections, always trying to bring in the voices that haven’t been heard, always trying to bring in information that was formerly excluded, so its not just about connections between people, but creating more information than the connections are made between data bits. Its all about weaving things together, so some of it’s relational, some of it’s even cognitive, we have to start seeing patterns.
The essence of that teaching for me is that if I’m dealing with a problem, say in a community, the first question I ask is “who else would have insight on this?�. If I am in a conversation that’s just not going anywhere, I’d think “who else should come into the conversation?�. That’s how you create more connections, because it’s the information and perspectives people bring, not just the fact that we know of each other, but we actually need the information and perceptions that we each hold to create a healthier picture of what’s going on.
**What is the role of leaders?**
Leaders play a very definite role. If you’re working from the groundswell, grassroots, self-organising, perspective, first of all they have to believe that other people will do the work, not them. They have to believe that other people are creative, not just them. They have to have a bedrock faith in other peoples’ capacity. Then the work becomes, “how do I as a leader, create the resources for people to come together, how do I insist (and here is one of the places I d think control is good) that people participate�, you know we can’t do this without you, as the leader you want to keep checking that people are still focused on purpose, they still have a sense of why they are doing this, and as a leader you want to make sure that people are still learning from what they are trying.
As a leader you don’t punish people but you just encourage learning, which is quite as radical idea in a lot or organisations! (laughs). We’d rather punish than actually learn from our experiences. As a leader you understand that motivation is intrinsic, and internal, and you don’t get into trying to manipulate people by rewards and punishments, you don’t get fixated on all we need is another policy and all this will be fine. The way I say it these days is quite simplistic, that a leader needs to act as host, not as hero. You need to be the one who gathers people together, who welcomes them, makes them feel wanted in the work of the organisation. Then they’ll do anything for you actually, people love working for this kind of leader because it is like working for a teacher who brings out your best, this kind of hosting leadership does tend to bring out our best, and we feel really happy to be working with this person.
**And can anybody do that, or do you have to pick out particular people?**
No, no. While it’s not true that everybody can do it, it is surprising how many people become good leaders if they are connected to the issue. At the Berkana Institute we define a leader as ‘anyone willing to help’. Anyone willing to step forward when they see something that needs to be changed, they step forward and do it. Its not because they filled out a leadership questionnaire, its not because they went to leadership training, its because the issue was so compelling to them that they said “I just have to do this�. They don’t always know how to be a good leader, but they have identified themselves as someone who is willing to take responsibility and get things done, and then you can work with that.
**In the paper of yours I read, you said that you felt that plans weren’t very good, and that processes and principles were more important. I wondered how that relates to something like this: do you see there being value in generating a kind of community Energy Descent Action Plan?**
This (the Kinsale plan) isn’t a Plan so much as it is a guidebook, right? It’s a manual. What you did, how to do it, right? The kind of plans I was talking about it when a leader says “OK, here’s our goal, and here are all the steps for getting to it, like a 5 year strategic plan, you lay out all the steps, and you assume that’s how it’s going to work out, but it never does, never does.
One of the my colleagues once asked a group of corporate CEOs “if your competitors got hold of your strategic plan, would it give them vital information about what you’re doing?�, and they said not at all! The purpose of planning I think is to get everyone on the same page, to create better relationships, and to really get us thinking together. Then you launch into it with the realisation that you’re going to have to change a lot of it, and that’s fine, because now you’ve got the relationships, you’ve got a shared purpose, of course its going to change on you! This idea that we planned the world into existence is what I’m really commenting on, it doesn’t happen that way. There’s this great saying I got from a Christian minister, “if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans�!
**In Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, he talks of Mavens, Connectors and Salespeople, do you see such distinctions as useful?**
I don’t really hold to categories. It is just something that I have a long term avoidance of, I would even say repulsion of. For me its not that any of those are negative necessarily, but they are very static first of all, they hold people to a certain role, but the worst part of it is that in this culture what happens what happens to these categories. It’s like “you’re a Maven, I know who you are�, and I stop thinking, even being interested in you…
**Put you in a box….**
Exactly. And we do that now more than ever, because people are working so hard, and people are so stressed and preoccupied, that we just don’t have time for e exploration with each other, that would reveal that you are much more than a Maven. That’s where I think the piece I wrote on Schroedinger’s Cat in ‘Leadership and the New Science’ is very relevant here. This is a classic quantum physics experiment where it’s the observer who decides whether the cat that’s in the box is dead or not, and therefore kills it by their decision.
I relate that to what I see all the time now in schools and organisations where we simply put a label on people, and we don’t realise that by labelling them we are, in some sense, killing them. We’re just saying “you’re an autistic child�, “you have this learning disability�, in education now the number of syndromes that are tacked onto kids is just amazing.
**Even Steiner schools are very big on “he’s a choleric, he’s phlegmatic�…**
Yes, it never ends…. . It just separates us more and more from being curious about ‘well who are you?’ Then if we have time to sit and talk and you tell me a story about how you once went on the Trans-Siberian Railway, I think wow, you’re not the person I thought you were! Its how it deadens us to each other that I really resent.
**If a community energy descent planning approach were built around your ideas, how might it work, how might it unfold?**
Well, it would start with a very inclusive planning group, and then the planning group would start to try different things, learn as you go, it’s basic community organising for me these days. You get together those who are interested, you get talking, you get energised, you start to realise who else you need to include who is not yet in the room, you bring them in, you plan something, if you’re planning an event you learn what worked, what didn’t work, you go on to the next thing, and the next thing, and one of the things I’ve really noticed is that even in very poor communities in the US, if they get themselves together to do one thing, they just develop so much self confidence in their capacity, and then it will grow and grow and grow.
My basic theory of change these days is that you start wherever there’s passion, interest, a few people, and then you follow it wherever it leads you. Do one thing, and then it shows you ‘we really have to be working on this problem, in this arena, then you develop some capacity there and it reveals four other things that you need to be thinking…. In that way you work in a very networked way because you start anywhere in the network and you’ll see other aspects of the network and then other aspects, so its not linear, but it’s the way change efforts grow from very small beginnings to very inclusive systemic, very effective projects.
**One of the key challenges to this work is that at the moment we have an economy that is growing, but the scenarios emerging from peak oil are that we don’t get a steady state economy, rather a gradually contracting economy, so one challenge of this work is how do you paint that, present that, and offer that as a positive transition, we are up here now, but we could be down there and it could be infinitely preferable to where we are now. Do you have any thoughts on how we might, as it were, ‘sell’ or market that idea?**
I haven’t the faintest idea how you sell anything. The only process I know works is to have people be in a thoughtful conversation, then they’ll convince each other, “you know that wouldn’t really be so bad, remember when all the power lines were down and we finally started talking to each other again�. They’ll remember together experiences that show that a simpler life or having less energy available actually has some benefits, but what I find in using the conversational process is that it helps evoke people’s memories and experience, and then you’d convince me because I would remember those three weeks where we had no electricity, no phones, it was hard to get food, but I still remember that as the best moment with my neighbours ever.
Or when I didn’t have a car, there are lots of stories people would share with each other. We don’t ever sell people anything, unless we’re into the kind of manipulation that you really don’t want to be in, we really have to include people, and then trust that they will end up in a similar level of awareness. If they don’t convince themselves, they’re not going to be convinced. People only support what they create, there’s that principle again.
**Do you feel optimistic?**
I don’t care. (Rob laughs). No, I get asked this question all the time, and I gave a talk here on Monday night about hope and hopelessness, and moving beyond hope and into clarity. The problem with hoping, with being optimistic, is that if things don’t turn out the way we hope they will, then we’re consumed by fear. So hope and fear are like this (brings two fingertips together). I have worked long and hard on actually giving up hope, and moving into a place that’s called ‘beyond hope and fear’ in Buddhism. There is a place beyond that where you just do what feels right to you and you let go of outcomes..
**Cutting your attachment?**
Exactly, cutting your attachment. And this is cutting your attachment to outcomes, to needing to go a certain way. It’s very hard in the West for people to get their brains and hearts around this concept because we feel that “I have to be inspired, I have to be motivated, and I do that by saying “this will change the world, this will save the world, this will fix….” … it might, but it might not, it’s still the right thing to be doing.
**Thank you so much.**
Thank you.