5.05: Outside Tues + Tim - On our relationships to privilege

Show Notes

Tim: We had the incredible pleasure, delight and provocation of three authors coming in the first 3 episodes of our pod and so what we're going to get to do is reflect on those authors. Zaid Hassan, Cyndi Suarez and Richard Beard have all made wonderful appearances with us and dove deep into conversation with us, provoked us to think differently and collectively given us various different angles into privilege, into the scale, scope and depth of the work that we're trying to do. This is really [our] opportunity to kind of reflect and make sense of the three authors before we move into the next series [“Inspiration"] of the podcast.

Tim: If you want an alternative view on what is actually happening in the world, tune into the Find The Outside podcast. You get to meet people who are really getting positive things done or building an analysis that is helpful for those of us who are also getting positive things done.
Tuesday: I very rarely feel despair and I swear it is because of our work. I feel like we get to be with people - sometimes they're getting clobbered and sometimes they're losing - but they're at least making an effort to make the world better and then we talk with these three smart people who have power and influence in very different ways; different levels of privilege but they all have some power and influence for real and they're working to make the world better and so I feel like my daily life is working with these kind of folks and then if I open up to the news, I get a very different picture but I often want to ask people (people who aren't in our line and work): “What are you actually experiencing daily? What is humanity teaching you about itself daily, about the direction that we're going?”
Tim: I know I've said this a billion times on this podcast but one of the first things. Mr. Toke Moeller ever said to me was, “keep good company” - What's the narrative you're building around you? - and it was very good advice to me at the time because I wasn’t. Think about what are you putting in your ears, what you’re watching, who you’re listening to. I think that was one of the most remarkable things for me as a young man, as well as the first meeting of From the Four Directions where Meg [Wheatley], Toke and Bob Stilger and those people all brought us into a room (there were people from 32 different countries) and I suddenly realized I was part of a global movement. This wasn't just me - I’m not just some lonely, crazy nut job - I was actually part of a global movement. All these people are thinking like me and trying to lead like me. There's actually something happening in the world. So I think all three of these authors do that and I think maybe that's the role of authors - to put these messages out to illuminate these stories to bring fresh analysis that actually allow us not to buy into so much of the narrative we're sold day-to-day, moment-to-moment on so many of the feeds.
Tuesday: I was trying to find a through thread, beyond these are folks doing good work in the world and they're really brilliant. These folks seem to have varying levels of privilege and varying levels of relationship to that privilege. Cindy Suarez, who wrote The Power Manual, comes from a real lack of privilege but then writes about privilege and justice every day in her work and now has real access to power and influence as the leader of Nonprofit Quarterly. She’s making waves across North America in big ways. Richard Beard ascended into privilege and then turned his gaze in a more personal way into looking at privilege. And, then Zaid [Hassan] comes from incredible privilege.
Tim: Zaid is an incredibly bright dude who has followed his line of thought to the conclusion that he's reached. He’s just grown up with this incredible gift. My experience of him is he's always so incredulous that the outcome of our behavior is ‘this’ in the face of ‘this’ evidence.
Tuesday: This stew of the three authors was a mash of many different ways to go about making the kind of change we want to see in the world… but from very different vantage points. I also want to say Zaid, in some circles, is the only person I have seen asking some of the critical questions around race, class and wealth at that level of academic stature.
Tuesday: Sometimes our best thinkers… their role is actually not to say how to put it in practice. Their role is to open the door to more understanding and then practitioners figure out the practice. I’ve been really thinking about that in my life - what do we look to people for? You don't have to do all of the things. There is a gift of shining the light on something or opening a door to new understanding and saying look here and then people figure out what to do.
Tim: What I liked about Meg Wheatley, for example, in my life is that she gave me a theory to test. She was like, well here's living systems theory what if we tried this instead of a mechanistic, linear approach to problem solving?
Tim: One of the things I found fascinating in interviewing Richard Beard was that he was behaving in the way he was describing. His ability to deflect away from a conversation about him personally - I was listening back to the pod and he really did a successful job of not telling us about him personally at all, despite some very direct questions. And, I am so grateful for the authors who are out there writing in this field because it's such a missed part of our analysis on how we get change done and especially from the kind of lens of British culture which has been so informative of the education and upbringing of people of wealth and upper classes or ruling classes and other countries all over the world.
Tuesday: I really enjoyed this author series. All three of them were so provocative for me, but from such different vantage points. Every time I was like, “mind blown!” There's just so many ways to understand the world and to then go to work on what you understand for the good.