So how was "change!" for you? I don't want to interrupt your pleasant aftershocks but we'll need to feel something other than sweet relief.
Trying to muster big change usually feels like a pain in the pelvic floor but, for millions of us, this last week has turned a lot of fearful clenching into some sudden noises of release. As I discovered at a special day hosting with the RSA and Battery Tour recently, however, real change feels like something deeper – and you don’t have to wait another four years to get it.
I don’t think many of us are getting over-excited.
Labour’s UK election win wasn’t a vote of passion. France’s surprise switcheroo away from the far right in its second-round election has left ungovernable uncertainty. And England do like to leave it ‘till the FINAL MINUTE to put away a winning goal.
Won’t lie, still all feels quite good though, eh?
A surprising amount gooder than most of us are used to feeling about national issues, whether we understand refereeing decisions or not.
At least for a few hours, or even days, I’ll say it feels like relief. Like a weight being lifted a bit. Potential returning. Along with blood supply to your largest sphincter. Maybe.
Now, I’ve suggested for years that a lot of business leaders talking about transformation and change at innovation events won’t really want it because transformation and change is a bigger headache than your election night hangover and no one really knows what it looks like anyway. Like sustainability. Or recent would-be MP for Clapham & Brixton Hill Mark Matlock . To really do change is to invite in creative crazy talk and, after the inspiring keynote, that just seems silly and unbankable. Y’know, in the real world… where definitely every single Reform candidate and global corporate shareholder absolutely lives.
Perhaps in line with this, someone like Matt Desmier might also add that, despite all the futury innovation voices in your Linked In feed, we’d all do well to consider just how much of our futures will be made up of stuff we already know.
Still. Change is constant and total as a state of existence. So much, what most of us are really doing every day is our best to ignore it. ..And there you are trying to make it, you silly lefty sausage.
Then, one day, after all the work and wait, change just makes itself obvious.
Changing the weather.
Change in humans’ sensible decision making hilarity starts with culture. Something in the brain turning a different colour. Like all hopes of engagement, mood matters. Last spring, when the council changed from Conservative to Liberal Democrat and positive political partners like the Greens in my local authority, I know that going to work felt different to the professionals in there. The daily signals of values, attitudes, vision. Leadership sets a tone for trust or fear, with a massive motivational difference triggered or cultivated in us as a result.
Now that we’ve had something similar f i n a l l y happen in Westminster, we all have a sense of how that changes what we feel is possible in our nation, those of us in the UK. Even with an election campaign leading up to this so uninspiring we were home-tattooing the days of it onto our inner thighs to relieve the numbness. We didn’t do lockdown training for nothing.
But, whatever the relief, the economic trends everywhere haven’t changed. A new report from Influence Map today seems typical. All those outputs into the structures of our daily lives in all the material and cultural fails still add up to a ballooning nightmare of injustices, poisons and no one mentioning The Asset Class.
So I’ll suggest that what you may well be feeling as a hitherto-unwanted reasonable and caring progressive voter this week, if you think of yourself as one, isn’t change. It’s payback. A tiny hit of petty power. You’re basically Farage now. ..Feels a bit sexy, doesn’t it.
What does actual positive change really feel like, then, to know you’re doing it?
In other words, how can you feel like you’re making a personal difference in epically horrible times once the relief wears off?
Well for starters, I’m happy to say it doesn’t mean searching for a political G*-spot. (Ew.) It’s much more to do with more literally making music.
Joining the action.
London Climate Action week took place across the last week of June and I’d been invited by showbiz changemaker and music pal AY Young to co-host some sessions with him at the RSA . The first, Building Bridges was a streamed couple of panels with a live audience that aimed to: “explore how to break down the barriers and bridge the divides that prevent progress towards sustainability and regeneration”.
AY had managed to bring together a selection of friends that typified his attitude and mission – sector-leaping partnership.
Zoologist and greenfluencer Margreen joined sci & planning student and entepreneur in Liverpool Hana Sanadi , data expert Musidora Jorgensen , Chief Impact Officer with the World Wide Generation, fellow data lover Nadia Humphreys , Sustainable Finance at Bloomberg, Shomy Hasan Chowdhury , Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) activist, the ever-dynamic Daniel Stander , Special Advisor to the United Nations, and Andrew Teverson , owner and director at festival clean energy biz The Stage Bus – they all sat next to each other in this first session and didn’t need the context explaining at all. I think most people on the panel quoted Sustainable Development Goal 17 Partnerships readily – all of them very in line with one of the RSA’s major themes in its 270th year – radical collaboration.
But the thing I want you to snap back to and take note of, is who was sitting in the middle of these names – a music artist. He was the catalyst figure for us all being together.
The principle became more explicit perhaps in the other streamed panel chat, Music for impact – and after a day of hosting and listening, this was where I allowed myself a just a few preachy interjections off the leash. Because, this gets to the nub of things for me. Duh.
Jarvis Smith musician, founder of My Green Pod and the PEA awards, Lisa Merrick Lawless , co founder of Purpose Disruptors, Eleanor Anderson , behavioural economist passionate about the environment joined us on stage for a longer discussion with a very engaged audience. Music artist Alex Hepburn got caught in London traffic and sadly missed the panel but was a learned chat afterwards.
How does music really make impact? Is it a few well known figures finally getting over their fears of imperfect green hopes and sometimes saying a few environmental things? Is it writing more about our environmental experiences? Is it powering concerts with clean energy and reducing landfill merch?
Yes and maybe and certainly and jeepers yes please and, hey, let’s explore all that. But I think it also means something symbolic that I’m trying to embody and that AY fizzingly does. Standing in the middle of different practical sectors as a figure of creative confidence.
“A bank working with an artist, that’s absurd” as he said to our other panelist and rep from one of his biggest sponsors – a bank.
But Sarisher Mann , Sustainable Finance communication lead at BNP Paribas CIB has a very instructive testimony. Not just to the themes our day but perhaps to the very work of the RSA. She brings passion and energy to her role challenging systems in and with Europe’s largest bank, but the simple observation that she is someone with a financial background who moved into sustainable finance, then into global climate advocacy, into place-based project testing and now into fellowship at the Royal Society of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce is a symbolic path. All that creative energy has led her to feel part of the arts.
This isn’t just a cute framing by an artist. It’s a thing for any of us “change!”makers to notice consciously. When you leap confidently between sectors to connect people and ideas, following a vision to see something realised into the world, you are thinking and behaving exactly like an artist.
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Making the difference.
Stopping over with Rogue Futures founder and cultural ecologist, Regina Atienza , I was reminded that she is another dear mate with whom I really should hit Record before we even order the drinks. She said something to me the night before that got to the heart of the potential before we’d even had the day.
“We don’t need more conversations about creativity. We need to put more musical instruments in people’s hands.”
Just pause there. Take that in.
We don’t need more conversations… about how to do creative change. About models of engagement and thinking. We need to put more musical instruments in people’s hands.
That IS the change. The feeling of making a different vibration with your body, your heart and, yes, your imagination.
In a session with AY and RSA boss, after 30 years with the Bank of England, Andy Haldane , moderated by Sarisher, I nudged Rina conspiratorially in the audience to bring some of the gold from our chat the night before. She raised her hand and asked AY bluntly: “How many artists have you created with your work?”
A challenge, even for him. The vision of his initiative Project 17 is to bring together all sorts of artists and corporations in a conspicuous leap across sectors, languages and thinking. But really, the challenge of global culture change is to unlock art in all of us. Our personal capability to respond creatively.
Unprompted, later in that session, something happened that interrupted the great chats with the perfect experience of this. Lama Tashi Norbu simply stood and said: “If I may, I’d like to lead us all in a song.”
An artist now based in the Netherlands, Tashi is a Tibetan Buddhist and was dressed very conspicuously in his robes, having also just come from a meeting of indigenous leaders in another room, so none of the polite white folk among us would obviously have had a clue how to say: “Nah, mate, we’re having a nice academic discussion about policy implications”. Which was obviously splendid.
So, there in the room, he immediately bid us repeat and riff on a phrase, melodically. People took stumbling vocal steps into the chorus. We grew more confident. The room changed.
When he ended and everyone erupted, I called across the room to him as the applause died down:
“May I ask what we were invoking with that song? What’s the spirit of what we all joined in with?”
“It’s calling for fruitfulness in our creative endeavours” he said and explained a little of its sense of prayer.
Later that evening he came over and handed me his card. I thanked him for what he’d done: “You just cut through the talk and showed us what creativity feels like. What change feels like.” He politely nodded and smiled.
Creativity, the acts of it, practicing expressions of what we’re feeling and thinking, feels like change to me. Because, as it shimmers out of your bones and into the work, it builds a vital vibration in you –?confidence. It changes you in the doing. And it is only practice. It is natural for us to do this – to make new worlds out of apparently nothing and to lean into transformation, step by step.
God knows, we need new chapters. Circumstantial help to turn a corner; an internal weather change. I am working for it with Momo.
But as showbiz adland mate Gellan Watt said yesterday: “We are not a single body of work. We have chapters. New origins. Inside perspectives. Outside perspectives. Tales. Learning. Opportunities. Chances missed. Chance taken. We are change.”
No wonder that when we respond to problems with art, making things, testifying creatively, we can feel change like something different. It feels like something happening in you.
It feels like the future.
Watch the RSA Replay of Building bridges: London Climate Action Week:
Watch the RSA Replay of Music for impact: London Climate Action Week:
And, as an extra, if you fancy a little unedited walk with me back to get the train home afterwards, here I share some off the cuff thoughts about establishments and engagements, in: It feels like this:
( *G = Grifters, obviously. )
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