What we're capable of building

On Tuesday night I was sitting in Stoneleigh Abbey listening to the Coull Quartet play Schubert and Beethoven, raising money for Pancreatic Cancer UK and Myton Hospice. This was the third fundraising concert put on at Stoneleigh by the Worsted Weavers' Company of the City of Coventry. There was something gentle and peaceful and human about the evening. It was wonderful to sit in the beauty and artistry of the music for an hour with family and friends.

During that same hour and on into Tuesday night, in Northern Ireland, masked men were going from house to house burning people out of their homes because of the colour of their skin.

I weep to think of it and I've kept turning that over ever since. Both happened at the same time. Human beings sat in a beautiful old building and made something that moved a room to stillness, and human beings, in the same country, on the same night, terrorised their neighbours out of their homes.

So much of the work I do with leaders is really about putting the conditions in place that allow good to happen. Beauty doesn't happen by accident. Someone learned an instrument for years. Someone organised the concert, booked the venue, sold the tickets, set out the chairs. Cruelty doesn't happen by accident either. It's organised. Someone decided which houses. Someone made it feel allowed, or even righteous, to the people doing it.

If both of those things require organising, require someone to build the conditions for them, then surely we need to question which one we're putting our effort into. We have a Ministry of Defence. We don't have a Ministry for Peace. We pour resource and attention and status into preparing for conflict, which of course is necessary, but we leave the work of building the conditions for peace to someone else, whoever happens to feel like doing it, in their spare time, with whatever's left over. That's a choice. I'm about to join the board of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. I'm drawn particularly to their work on addressing the root causes of conflict and injustice, including their work on peace in Northern Ireland.

Workplaces aren't so different. Most organisations I work with would say they want a thriving culture. Very few of them are actually organising for it in the way they organise for, say, financial performance, or risk, or compliance. Burnout and bullying don't generally happen because anyone wanted them to happen. They happen because nobody was doing the equivalent work of booking the venue and setting out the chairs. Nobody built the conditions for beauty. So the gap got filled by something else.

If you're a leader, the thing to look out for is how much of what happens in your organisation, good or bad, is the result of conditions someone built, often without realising they were building anything at all. The culture that makes people feel safe enough to be honest, or unsafe enough to keep quiet. The culture that makes prejudice something that gets challenged in the room, or something that gets a knowing look and moves on. None of that is neutral. None of it happens by accident. If it's not being built on purpose, something is still being built. Just not by you.

If you're someone who has been on the receiving end of the horrors of any of this, my heart goes out to you. I wish I could end these thoughts tidily with a neat call to action but I don't have one. The most honest thing I can do is to notice both truths at once and not look away from either.

What am I reading? 📚

I’ve just read When The Cranes Fly South which is about many human stories at once. An elderly man keeps his wife’s scarf in a screwtop jar so he can open it and smell her scent. It's very moving.

What am I watching? 👀

We finally made it to the Tracey Emin - A Second Life exhibition at the Tate Modern. Her life is her art - much is extremely painful to look at - but that's the point.

What am I listening to?👂

Schubert. It's very calming.

Joy-giving things 😍

The 14th century gatehouse at Stoneleigh Abbey.

Another human-made thing of beauty.

Have a good weekend

Lucy

ChangeOut is created by Lucy Caldicott. You can find more about my work at ChangeOut.org.

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