Spaces of Safety

Our Organisations must hold a somewhat unusual space, when stacked up against what we see in our broader society. As politics devolves into a partisan shouting match, simplifying complex contexts into naive soundbites, and largely circumnavigating economic reality, it falls to our Organisations – within both legal and ethical structures – to hold spaces of difference and dissent, to be multi-cultural, to reach broadly across the Communities that they serve, not simply to burrow deeply into one part of that landscape, like a parasite.

This is a space of significant movement: whilst technology is carrying us away from the landscape, our social context grounds us back into it, albeit through a new lens. Today we are geographically local – the spaces of our homes and offices – and also globally local – the spaces of our connected communities and global Organisations.

Leadership in these spaces is both structural (delivering the product or service, and the profit) but also Social (holding the Social Context within which we are effective, and the cultural context which should act in service of all).

It does not have to be, but it should be.

The Tolpuddle Martyrs – catalysts for early unionisation and codification of workers rights – were sent into exile from a court just twenty miles from where I live. And their actions, and subsequent repatriation, represented a right that I hope still holds true: that businesses should be successful, but not at any cost.

And sometimes the act of leadership is to determine what cost is acceptable, at various levels.

My own work carries a liberal bias, but I think not an unrealistic one. It posits that the socially intact organisation is more effective because it has access not simply to structural means, but also collective social ones, and in this I am supported by the research, which indicates that Organisations act much like ecosystems and crowds, when it comes to culture.

With this in mind, I finished the new new illustration for ‘Safety and Shelter’, a short programme that looks at how we find hope, build resilience, and share spaces of shelter. It’s gentle but important work, prompted by the many conversations of fear and loss I’m hearing in times of uncertainty and change.

Organisations are, of necessity, generally pragmatic, and hence we have seen global brands pivoting to the new geopolitical reality. But the cost of this is held partly in fear and loss within their own communities.

This is not a programme about what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ (we can each hold our own views on this), but rather about how we experience change, and whether we are alone in finding our way through it.

It’s part of a broader landscape, considering the role of leaders in our modern Organisations and contemporary society: not simply as ‘directing action’, or ‘giving purpose’, but rather ‘creating conditions’, and ‘holding space’. In this case, the space to ensure we can hold difference and dissent, within an overarching structure.

I think that our radically partisan environment is squeezing out these spaces of shared and diverse belief and belonging, but we are not helpless to rejuvenate them.

Or I could put this another way: the role of a Social Leader is to create an Organisational ecosystem that we wish to inhabit, and which earns the title of fair, safe, and effective. So this is about success at the right cost, borne fairly, not at any cost, simply imposed.