Zombie, dinosaurs and crocodiles

It’s that time of year when everyone seems to review the past year and plan for the next one. Seems an appropriate time for me to blow the dust off a draft post I started near the beginning of 2013 but never quite completed. Why appropriate? Because it’s about looking back and looking forward.

Zombies, dinosaurs and crocodiles? No, not some dynamic new icebreaker game, but a summary of an ongoing conversation Rhizome folk started in 2013. We’re always talking about the role of Rhizome in the wider world and we often find ourselves critical of the social action movement, including, sometimes, those who support it with training and facilitation (and yes, we do include ourselves in that category).

photo: Bob Jagendorf

It all started with a comparison of the social action movement with a zombie. (Un)dead on its feet but staggering on regardless, moribund. That’s not to say there’s no change or innovation, but it’s often within the same tired paradigm. A bit harsh? Maybe, but there’s a good deal of merit in the argument that it’s a movement that needs to revitalise or become irrelevant

And talking of things no longer alive, as part of the same

Barry Kid Photography

conversation we paused to ask ourselves whether Rhizome was in fact a collective of dinosaurs. Just a bunch of out of date fossils with a nostalgic view of how change should be made (cue: “in my day we didn’t have t’internet. Our office were in a paper bag in a septic tank and had to weave our own campaign banners out of cold gravel…and we considered ourselves well resourced”…. “Office? You had an office?….”).

After all we talk a language of community building and collective action but not in a ‘Big Society’ way. Our ideas of community might seem a bit pre-Thatcher.We promote face-to-face interaction, and we do so by delivering most of our work face-to-face – no  e-learning, no youtube channel. If it wasn’t for this blog, who knows where we’d be? We put most of our effort into supporting group-work, not building the capacity of individual key mobilisers, or whatever the jargon is at the moment. We champion participatory collective action which seems to fly in the face of ever-increasing individualism. And individualism isn’t something that just happens when we’re acting alone. So many of our group meetings are full of individuals working towards their individual agendas. It’s one big reason why we’re not more effective and one of the reasons we ask groups to take the time to work on their internal processes despite the seeming urgency of the issues they’re working on. We continue to promote consensus decision-making despite the (often valid) critiques of how it has been used by Climate camp or Occupy.

For goodness sake we’ve recently written a document citing the nonconformist movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Isn’t it time we stopped harking on about the past as if it were some kind of utopia and get on with building the future utopia? Do we just need to get with the times or put ourselves out to grass?

Norbert Nagel / Wikimedia Commons

As it happens, we settled on an image of ourselves as crocodiles – more or less prehistoric but surviving and thriving to this day where many younger species have failed.

We look at the social action movement and see quite a few babies being hurled out with the bath water as change after change is made in everything but mindset. We see NGOs struggling to find a model that delivers the maximum change – networks of groups, well-resourced individuals, mobilising masses of supporters in 5 minute armchair actions

When I look back on the work Rhizome has done over the past few years, I believe we have a lot to offer present and future change-makers. We focus on changing mindsets, values, and attitudes over giving people skills and tools. Tools without appropriate understanding are next to useless. The inspiration we draw from participatory movements of the past is all about building a new culture of democracy, helping individuals to genuinely co-operate and work collectively for their utopia, whatever that might be. We want to build diverse communities not movement of individuals. You might find that if we build those communities, we’re living utopia long before we’ve “won” all our campaigns. See you in 2014.

Matthew

HOWTO – enhance your organisation

We think most organisations can be better at what and how they do things. We specialist in decision making by consensus, conflict resolution, facilitation and participative ways of working, co-op development and a host of other relational skills.

We recognise that most of our potential collaborators are skint or exist on shoestring budgets. As we do. So here’s the idea – you and we bid for funding together. Here’s where we know we can work well with you –

1. Research and advocacy

We think the nature of activism is constantly evolving, for example moves to on-line working; and ‘constructive activism’ (ie We’re not just against this, we’re for THAT; or the ‘Another world is possible’ approach). As researchers we would work with you to map how these shifts could affect or benefit you, and what helps or hinders any progress. This could be a working-inside-the-group approach or a more detached researcher role (ie observation and semi-structured interviewing). As ideas emerge and prove to be useful, we’d share this with the wider network and publish stuff (web or physical).

We can also work on issues of ‘leadership‘ in consensus based campaigns – why do campaigns generally fail to replicate the early energy, and manage to bring new perspectives and people into leadership? Is it to do with a limited set of people with the energy/wit and drive? Or is it more about unconsciously and unintentionally falling into command/control modes? Or something else? How is all this impacted by wider social discourses (ie the political context, actions of the state, recessionary pressures, trying to operate alternatively in the midst of mainstream, etc)? Again we can work with you to discern these patterns and work on ways through.

Comparing and contrasting modes of operation. This idea overlaps with the previous two, but the focus is on how different modes of operation (eg consensus, consultative, top down etc) impact on wider public and political consciousnesses. For example, how Greenpeace (core and supporters), Amnesty (big hierarchical orgn with supporters), direct action by consensus grass roots (UK Uncut, Occupy, Climate Camp) differ in impact as a result of mode of operation. This would connect to concepts of medium and long term sustainability of organisations. Is there an ideal form and way of working that maintains impetus? This would factor in funding, personality, situation in wider social context, timescale of project, impact desired etc.

2. Infrastructure

Range of workshops, resources and hands-on support to a range of organisations. Idea that this support is stratified – eg 1. nursery or start up, 2. needs additional practical support, 3. operating well or artist who needs action learning, deeper reflection (eg hubs, Communities of Practice, networks etc).

This to be offered at set points throughout the year and bespoke for one to one support. But will include applying products of learning from research, basic infrastructure support (ie governance, ways of working, people co-operation, marketing, ‘leadership’ etc). Note – precise nature of this support to be developed with orgns who support this bid.

Getting the funding

Once some of you say, “yes”, we will work on bids with you. So let’s be having you.

Truth and reconciliation in consensus

Nelson Mandela has been laid to rest. Countless words have been written about his life and his legacy, and with good cause. I’m not going to try to add too many more to that count. What’s clear is that he (and those around him) inspired a nation to act against expectations, against self-interest, for a higher ‘good’ – a unified, multiracial South Africa.

Inspiration, acting against self-interest and for a higher purpose are all necessary, central values in any consensus decision-making group. How many groups that use consensus actually, consciously, live and work to those values is another matter.

What most consensus groups need are more Mandela moments. They need to find inspiring, collaborative ways out of seemingly impossible, sometimes ideological, struggles. Positions are taken and fiercely held too. They are reinforced and dug in with the language of values and idealism. The stage is set for yet another conflict in which there are ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. The real loser is our ability to collaborate, our belief in co-operation, our sense of community.

Where’s the truth and reconciliation in all this? We invent truths, fly our standards from them, gather our forces around them, forgetting that they are just one possible view of the truth. And reconciliation, real reconciliation is rare. Feelings are usually strained but never fully repaired. Our groups are weakened, and with that our ability to function as cohesive forces for social change.

It’s tough, but we need more people, more groups, to step up and inspire those Mandela moments – to show the way to processes of truth and reconciliation. And we need more people and more groups to do the work to turn inspiration into consensus.

Of course if we deify Mandela we’ll never achieve that. What we need to remember is that inspiration needs to be channeled and turned into action and behaviour, to be enshrined in cultures, for it to make change. And that’s something that took many, many ‘ordinary’ people to achieve. Mandela provided the inspiration and the example, but tens of thousands of ordinary South Africans took that inspiration and did the work that made change possible.

Matthew