When we forget the why and have only the how, our imagination seeps into the gully of the status quo.
– On Freedom. Timothy Snyder
I work with people who either want to, or have to – do things differently. They may exist in the systems of government, or organisations elsewhere. The mandate to change often arrive on two dark paths that I will discuss briefly, based on the experience of stewarding such change.
Organisations may act out of fear: of being left behind, of a shrinking market share or other forms of existential economic reprisal, of rankings dropping, due to fear of public opinion, the plausibility of legal reprisal. Organisations may also act out of compliance: new legislation coming into effect, or to hit some deadline imposed by factors outside of their control (e.g. supply chain audits driven by the 2015 Modern Slavery Act to evidence due diligence in exploitative labour practices.)
The thing is – a state of fear of reprisal isn’t conducive to imagining otherwise. It is an impediment of learning and sense-making, critical examination, exploration, and arriving to reasonable conclusions. A state of reprisal – whether it’s the threat of a low grade, exclusion from class, or from community – mutually reinforces the crude practices of dead-eyed repetition of a pre-approved canon instead of enlivening ideas, the realm of propaganda, indoctrination, learning scaled up to the masses that are safest when kept dumb and beaten down.
If you ever experienced, in bodily reality, the above – as a child trying to learn by heart a poem or an equation, or as an adult trying to keep up with trending recipes or using workplace chatbots – you are asked to strive for doing things differently but you are stripped of agency to interrogate why exactly do you have to do things in this new way?
The was once an organisation who failed the people it claimed to serve, to a deathly extent. Once the body count was established and attributed, and some binding and non-binding legal commitments were broadcast in the media – the organisation set out to ‘implement technology transformation’ to better serve the people who remained. The transformation itself was rocky, parties contested its aims, and the tools that it intended to implement. Under this fearful, scrutinised, high-pressure premise, the organisation and its enablers quickly lost sight of why the transformation was needed. They lost sight of the why, in favour of the non-complicated, status-quo question of –
Q: Transformation how?
A: By implementing technology.
They elected to not do the work of considering the why? In one interpretation, the transformation was needed because the organisation was sued, fined, brought under review, scrutinised, shamed, publicly disgraced. In another, the transformation was needed because the organisation transgressed the trust of the people it claimed to serve, demonstrably, irreversibly, lethally. To choose the right interpretation, the organisation would have had to engage with discourse and reflection: learn from its supposed beneficiaries what they would expect of it after the devastation, act courageously and acknowledge on a human scale its errors of judgement, and make concrete, meaningful steps (meaningful to the people it serves) to change its ways. Digital transformation might be part of all this, if that is what people deem relevant.
Other than with consent and the endorsement of those intended to benefit from it, a piece of technology won’t ever address the breach of trust, or invite the organisation to reflect on its power structures, traced through legal evidence, of disregarding, dehumanising, or simply looking down on the people it serves.
The organisation had a problem of cowardice and of supremacy. It was called, in more acceptable terms, bureaucracy, institutional failure, lack of accountability. It was not a learning organisation, willing to listen, to consider that it might not have all the answers within its walls.
Without the will (curiosity? humility?) to engage with why people need to do things differently – what mainstream technocratic lingo calls innovation – how the innovation makes things different is a limited exercise. Fundamental innovation that benefits the people it claims to serve – welcomes those people to the discussion, invites their fearless imagination without pre-approved answers, and supports courageous innovation.
Innovation shifts power. It is a deliberate choice whether it shifts power toward the people it serves, or syphons power away from them.
I want to uplift two alternatives where change could originate, and be embraced. One is community demand, a demand to do things better not out of fear of the community, but to serve and strengthen the community. How one would learn about this is – by opening the door, inviting in community members. The English health service’s Patient Advice and Liaison Service embraced this ethos, and so do participatory budgeting and policy-defining citizens’ assemblies.
In these dynamics, institutions, policy-makers, technocrats, or academics (or millionaires) admit that they do not have all the answers for making things work differently. So they turn to the people they imagine will be subject to the change that is deemed important. That is where participatory methods, public discourse, and sometimes life-changing decisions are seeded. These methods meaningfully increase the freedom of people, to define, design, and live the impacts of the change deemed necessary.
That is what I find enlivening about working in these spaces, using tools of invitation, convening, hospitality, facilitation – to hold impactful, substantive conversations, centering perspectives from people who are not often invited to think alongside those powerful to implement change. These encounters are fundamentally alive exchanges, subverting convention and seeding new forms of collaboration, community, and leadership.
draw together 