Dilemmas of Leadership

by Miki Kashtan

Yesterday I came back from 9 days of teaching in a yearlong NVC leadership program. This was the last intensive of the year, and the 9^th year of the program. As is often the case, I came face to face with the limits of my own leadership capacity. Specifically, I was grappling with my aversion to imposing anything on anyone, an ongoing challenge of significant intensity for me. Based on observing myself I am confident that because of this aversion I regularly involve groups in decisions that reduce efficiency of functioning without adding much empowerment value or meaning.

In one of those ironies of timing, this was also the week in which I read “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will not be Tweeted.” According to this article (and I confess not being deeply educated on the topic), the Civil Rights movement was heavily centralized in its leadership style. I found that fact disturbing, fascinating, complex, and provocative. Specifically, I find a generative tension in juxtaposing the effectiveness of the Civil Rights movement in its form of leadership with the anti-authoritarian ethos that came to prevail in many subsequent social change movements and lives in me in the form of this aversion to imposing.

Circumstances wouldn’t allow the topic to recede into the background. Yesterday I led a workshop at the Bioneers 2010 conference - Everyone Matters: Interdependence in Action, a topic which emerges directly from the core vision that inspires the work I do with Nonviolent Communication. The questions of leadership were once again prominent: What does this vision tell us about leadership? Is anti-authoritarianism the only way to ensure that everyone’s needs matter? What does all this mean in terms of our collective capacity to contribute to transformation on a significant scale, and to do it with love, courage, and creativity?

With those questions already on my mind, I went directly from my workshop to the Metta Center for Nonviolence for a viewing of a rare documentary about Gandhi made in the early 1950s. When Michael Nagler, founder and president of the Metta Center, initiated a conversation about the film, I raised the question that by then was already burning in me: Is top-down centralized leadership of the kind that both Gandhi and Martin Luther King apparently used absolutely necessary to have an effective movement to create significant change in society?

The conversation that ensued raised even more questions for me, and resolved hardly any. What does it really take for a group to function effectively in service to a complex task? Are emergent, self-organizing groups able to meet such challenges as mobilizing large numbers of people to create structural change using nonviolent methods? If strong leadership is indeed necessary (even Gandhi with all his charisma and willingness to sacrifice everything wasn’t ultimately able to prevent violence from erupting), where is the line between authority and authoritarianism? What can keep people empowered enough so they can entrust decision-making to leaders rather than submit or rebel? What can leaders do to avoid the abuses of power that stem from their own and others habits?

Precisely because I am so committed to transcending and transforming the deeply ingrained models of living and leading that we have inherited, I want to keep asking these questions. I want to think about them deeply, to learn more from what has happened before, to engage with others about them, and to experiment in my own small scale leadership. I have small scale evidence that efficiency is possible without compromising collaboration and empowerment. I feel completely humble about not knowing what’s really possible or necessary. This doesn’t stop me from cultivating the faith that collaborative, empowering, effective, and transparent leadership is scalable, and we can collectively meet the challenges of our time provided we have clarity of purpose, a deep commitment to nonviolence on all levels, and a rigorous personal practice. That is part of how I understand Gandhi’s legacy: an invitation to see means and ends as one, so we can live every moment, personally and as a leader, in courageous pursuit of love and truth.

The Edges of Confidence

by Miki Kashtan


 

In my last post I alluded to having discomfort when asked by a group of people on a conference call to share my own vision. I said I was planning to write a post about the incongruity of that discomfort. Now, sitting down to write about it, I am feeling it.

I chose to write about this for a variety of reasons. Primary among them is the desire to make my humanity, fallibility, and limitations known to you who read this blog, so as to increase the possibility that you would trust yourself to take on more visibility. Another is to create companionship for me and for those of you who identify. Another is to continue and deepen the practice of exposing and undefending my own vulnerability for my own growth and inner freedom. Lastly, related to the previous one, choosing to be on the forefront of the epochal movement towards a different kind of leadership that’s more transparent and less idolized.

I am connected to all of these reasons. And I am nonetheless struggling with why I might want to write and then post something so personal that may, after all, interest only a handful of people.

This is where I stopped a few days ago. Now coming back I see even more clearly where and why the challenge arises. I lose my sense of something being of value to others when it’s about me, or when it’s very radical in terms of vision. The intensity of it is so high that often enough I literally can’t tell whether or not I like what I wrote until someone else reads it. The experience of having a blog and posting things without running them by someone else first has been stretching me considerably in this area. So far I have overall gotten enough positive feedback that I keep finding the inner resources to continue. And still the discomfort persists.

Why is this discomfort incongruous? Because it shows up when I want to share what is most precious to me, my biggest visions for the world, my hope and faith in the actual practicality of creating systems based on caring for needs, it feels absolutely tragic to me. I so much want people to know about it, I so much want companionship in holding a sense of possibility, I so much want movement in that direction – and still I lose my confidence when asked to talk about it. That’s the incongruity for me.

This speaks to me of the depth of the needs for belonging and acceptance, both in me and in others, and of the anguish in moments when they seem to be in conflict with authenticity. I know many people who choose to let go of authenticity in order to gain acceptance and belonging, and who nonetheless suffer because they ultimately don’t trust the acceptance. For as long as acceptance depends on hiding the truth about who we are it remains suspect, temporary, elusive. What if people found out the hidden truth? I also know the experience of losing belonging and acceptance because of choosing to be authentic in ways that can be challenging for others. This is still work in progress to me. I have the contours of a path, without full clarity on where it leads. I know I want to grow in my flexibility about what feels authentic to me. I also at the same time want to grow in my willingness to risk losing everything for truth. I know how to grit my teeth and express truth anyway. What I want to learn more and more is how to remain relaxed and soft in my expression when I am stretching my limits.

I see now that I am re-discovering an insight I had a few months ago that I wrote about (Making Room for Being Different). For a moment I felt a wave of embarrassment and an instant urge to delete all I have written above. Then I realized that this is just how life happens. We cycle and circle and loop and spiral, learning things again and again, falling and getting up, and eventually something gets fully integrated and becomes a seamless part of who we are.

Most of the time I both appear and feel relaxed and confident about what I have to offer. I can do public speaking often without even preparing much. I can work with individuals and groups and facilitate intense conflicts. I can easily share ideas, insights, and visions. Still, the discomfort in writing or speaking about me and my visions can get paralyzing at times. Even in the course of writing this piece, and surely as I get closer to the actual posting of it, I have experienced waves of profound uncertainty about the value of sharing all this. I am happy to see that I am willing to take the risk without contracting inside. I’d like to believe that in addition to my own strengthening, exposing my discomfort and trying to make sense of it may support you who are reading this in gaining more courage to move closer to the edges of your confidence, so that more and more of us choose to bring forth our gifts and vulnerabilities. I have no doubt they are all needed for the immense task of making the world work for all of us.

 

Personal Growth and Social Change Addendum: Real-Time Conversation and Comments

by Miki Kashtan

Last Sunday, October 2^nd, I held a conference call to discuss my Personal Growth and Social Change mini-series. This was a total experiment that I had no idea how it would work. There was 44 people on the call for all or part of the time, and many more signed up and didn’t attend. The call was recorded, and anyone who wants to can listen to it. One exchange that was particularly moving for me was a conversation with a man who wanted to look at the question of privilege, and how painful he finds the idea of having to “give up” privilege in order to care for others’ suffering. When I shared with him my own faith that privilege is a poor substitute for real needs that we are told we can never meet, he felt much more hopeful about finding a way to move forward (I intend to post on this topic soon).

When we broke into small groups for in-depth exploration of some topics that came up, one of the callers wanted to hear from me about my own vision. To my astonishment, delight, and intense discomfort, an entire group of callers converged wanting to hear the same. (I intend to explore the incongruity of this discomfort in a separate post, hopefully tomorrow.) After I overcame my discomfort, I chose to focus my sharing on the vision of a global gift economy. This, too, is a rich vein, and I hope to revisit it again and again.

So, stay tuned. Based on the level of engagement and the unanimous vote of confidence at the end of the call, I am likely to schedule future calls on other topics that may be of interest to readers of this blog.

Meanwhile, on Tikkun Daily, where I am cross-posted, a small flurry of activity ensued when their managing editor, Dave Belden, issued an invitation to people to come to the call. In one reply to that article Michael Lerner, the founder of Tikkun, was immensely critical of NVC, which he sees as a generally useful tool that has the danger of turning people away from noticing what’s happening in the world and taking action to change it. In this comment he went further to say that NVC is “a stumbling block–they seem to think that the communication style is an end in itself. Unfortunately, NVC is compatible with what others have called ‘friendly fascism.’”

You can imagine this was not easy or fun to read. In the end, I wrote a new post called How NVC Can Help Progressive Politics. Even if you read the entire mini-series, that one piece is shorter and different enough in its focus that you may want to read it. (Of course writing it also meant that I wasn’t as available to write the next post for my own baby blog.)

I want to conclude with two invitations. One is for people local to the Bay Area, and one to people in many countries. The local is an invitation to Speaking Peace - BayNVC’s free annual fundraiser, during which I am doing an hour-long introduction to NVC (I rarely do those), and a rich program with music and celebrations and food. Yes, we ask people to contribute, and, true to our principles, only what people are moved to give freely is what we want.

The second invitation is to a new teleclass I am teaching next year through the NVC Academy. This is a yearlong class called Taking on the World: Learning to Become a Change Agent. My hope is to attract people who are serious about wanting to bring a consciousness and practice of nonviolence into the world at all levels. I hope to hear you there.

Personal Growth and Social Change (Part 7)

by Miki Kashtan

 

Part 1 of this topic was posted on Aug 8, and links are provided from there onwards to all the other parts of this mini-series. This is the last segment. If you would like to participate in a real-time conversation with me about these topics (this Sunday, 9:30 - 11:00am Pacific Time), click here for more details, or here to register.

I started this mini-series with noting that none of us ultimately knows what would (will? could?) bring about significant change, beyond our experiments with alternatives, beyond a vision absent material resources, beyond the smallness of our efforts. Before concluding, just a few comments about these unanswerable challenges.

Scaling up

To inspire confidence – both for ourselves and for others - in our ability to create significant change that affects large numbers of people, we need to find a way to continue to operate in radical, visionary, uncompromising ways while scaling up. We need to find ways to break out of the conviction that we can only do radical experiments with small numbers, and that becoming more visible, increasing our numbers, and gaining power and influence are bound to bring corruption, and/or bureaucracy, and/or inefficiency, and/or all other social evils. This conviction will either keep us small and ineffective, or become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I don’t know the answer. I am convinced it exists. I will continue to look for it, and to keep imagining and encouraging everyone I know, including myself, to move towards it without fear of falling.

Who is “we?” I use this word loosely to refer to everyone who is in the grips of the heartbreak about our beautiful planet being destroyed by the actions of human beings like us. After all, all of us, regardless of our beliefs and affiliations, are, ultimately, struggling to make sense of the world and attend to our own, our loved ones’, and others’ needs in the best ways they know how. All of us are implicated in the destruction, whether we want to or not.   

Building Alliances and Coalitions

"It is possible that the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual.
The next Buddha may take the form of a community--
a community practicing understanding and loving kindness,
a community practicing mindful living.
This may be the most important thing we can do for the earth."

Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnamese Buddhist monk, poet, and peace activist)

The days of one-person operations appear to be largely over. The Lubavitchers, the largest Hassidic movement, now operate without a new Lubavitcher, because the tradition held that only seven generations of leaders would be guiding this movement, and now no one knows what comes next. This is not about giving up leadership. This is about many more people taking leadership all around them.

Working our way out of charismatic leadership will require us to work with others who are not members of our specific movement. As we reach out to create such connection, we will encounter people who will agree with us on some bits and not on others. And we will still need to work with them. If we are to be truly effective, we will need to work with people who are far from our positions. We cannot make significant change without connecting with people who are in fundamental opposition to what we are proposing (if we even propose anything rather than simply protesting). The Department of Peace Campaign has been working hard for some years now to support the establishment of a federal level Department of Peace in the US government. As of a few months ago, they still hadn’t crossed the Democrat/Republican divide. There will be no Department of Peace Legislation for as long as that divide is not crossed in the constituency that operates the campaign.

How? We need tools to dialogue, to come more present, to know to separate strategies from needs, to see the underlying vision of opposing views, and to know that more is in common between us at the level of vision than we may be comfortable admitting. We need to learn to listen with a willingness to be changed, and take on the hard and thankless work of listening to our ideological enemies, no matter where we are, so we can learn and grow, so we can create bridges, so we can find ways of collaborating, and thereby begin, now, the work of the future. Because in that future there will still, and always, be people that disagree with us. There will always be people who will see our implementation of our vision as an absolute threat to what they hold most dear. And we will need to include and embrace their needs and well-being in full if we are to operate with integrity.

What to do now

Since we cannot, as the Talmudic Jews said, “press the end” (meaning force things to move faster than they do), and since acceptance of what is is part and parcel of our work, we cannot escape the reality that, for now, we don’t know what will create change. In fact, taking seriously the fundamental uncertainty and unpredictability of life in part means that we don’t and can’t plan change. We can only be ready for it. Two years before the Berlin Wall was taken down no one would have predicted that outcome. And it happened. What might happen within the next two years that we cannot imagine now?

If we cannot predict, cannot plan, and cannot implement large scale social change, we can only keep working to be ready for opportunities when they arise. Every once in a while, we never know when, how, or for how long, the existing order of things is put on hold, and much more is possible. At such times many more in the world are hungry for direction, for hope, for tools, and for possibilities. I’d like to believe that we can use our small-scale efforts at obstruction, creation of alternatives, and consciousness transformation to get us all ready, so that when the window opens up, we will be available to respond to the call to lead and to offer inspiration and clarity that can make a decisive difference. I hope I am still alive when that day arrives.

Invitation to Real-Time Conversation

by Miki Kashtan


Over the course of writing about personal growth and social change, I discovered a longing in me to go beyond posting entries into active interaction with the people who read my blog. So I decided to experiment with that urge.

In the next couple of days I intend to post the LAST entry in this mini-series. Writing about personal growth and social change within an NVC perspective has been a two-month endeavor that I truly enjoyed. If you found the ideas intriguing, and/or if you want to connect with me and others who are passionate about principled nonviolence as a way of living, I invite you to come and participate in a conference call that I am setting up for this coming Sunday at 9:30 - 11:00 am Pacific Time.

The agenda is emergent. For right now what I have thought about including is questions and comments about anything that's been part of this mini-series, and small group interaction about these topics for part of the time (the conference call technology for this call - maestro conferencing - allows for that). I have no idea how many people might sign up, so it's hard for me to plan beyond this. I hope you will join by following this link:  bit.ly/9abV2H. I also am planning on writing about the call after it's complete.

Personal Growth and Social Change (Part 6)

by Miki Kashtan

This mini-series started on Aug 8, and this is the 8^th post so far. The previous post was on Sep 21. Each of the posts can be read separately.

Example: Gift Economy

Because I have such a deep longing for a gift economy, so deep that truly every day hurts in seeing how far we are from such a system, I continually look for examples of gift economies already operating so I can sustain and expand the solidity of my faith in this possibility.

I am less interested in hunter gatherer societies that still have gift economies than in examples within the existing modern capitalist economy. Here are a few. If you have examples that you know of, I invite you to comment on this blog. This can be food for all of us.

·        Inter-library loan: many academic libraries as well as public libraries use this system. If you look for a book that’s not available in the library you are at, the staff will look for the book elsewhere, in other libraries, sometimes outside the country, and the library that has the book will send it to your library for loaning to you. In the case of an article, quite often the library that has the article will make a photocopy and mail it to you. All this is done without any money changing hands, nor any accounting about which library does it more or less often.

·        International mail delivery: whenever anyone sends a letter to another country, they are assured that the other country will deliver the letter. Have you ever thought of the fact that while you pay for the stamp in your country the other country receives no money for delivering the letter? This, again, is a system that operates without accounting, and has been for centuries.

·        In the world of software many products and services exist that are completely public domain, without anyone giving anyone else money, while many people contribute to these products and services.

·        If you want to be inspired by one organization that has experimented with working on a gift basis despite everyone’s caution and advice, look up charityfocus.org. I recently had the very good fortune of participating in one of their events, and was deeply nourished by the overflow of joy and generosity that I experienced. Charity focus is an organization without staff – everything is done on a volunteer basis. Just in case you imagine something small and local, I was astonished to discover they have 300,000 members worldwide.

A gift economy differs from a barter economy. Although I love the idea of localizing economies and currencies, even a full barter system without currency is still based on exchange. The essence of a gift economy for me is that it’s based on giving freely. Giving freely means having no expectation of receiving anything in particular from anyone. In that sense it changes the nature of the relationship. Giving freely also means cultivating trust that enough giving will take place so that what I need for sustenance and well being will be provided, without knowing how. This requires a deep trust. Perhaps what most inspires me about Charity Focus is the degree of trust.

I am personally deeply drawn to operating on the basis of gifting. Even within the exchange economy, I keep stretching the limits to approach gifting as much as my imagination sustains. Since my experience with Charity Focus my enthusiasm is increasing. I anticipate doing something concrete about it in the coming months, so stay tuned.

Since I was five, I haven’t had anyone successfully answer my question to my mother: why is it that we need to give money to get our food? Why can’t everyone just take what they need? I am more and more convinced that there is no real answer as to why we couldn’t shift out of the money and exchange economy into a gift- and needs-based economy. When we learn to have structures and processes that support working from willingness, and when we learn to care about everyone’s needs, the technology and imagination are there to sustain free contribution, giving, and receiving on a global scale. This is what I dream about and what fuels my continued joyful willingness to do my work.

No, the mini-series is still not over… I still want to write about scaling up, and about what to do now, when this world is not in place. I now know that the next post is really the last, because I already wrote it…

Personal Growth and Social Change (Part 5)

by Miki Kashtan

 

This mini-series started on Aug 8, and this is the 7^th post so far. The previous post was on Sep 10. Each of the posts can be read separately.

Working towards and creating change (as distinct from change happening, which is a constant in life) involves conscious choice and action. On the personal level, this means becoming more the person we would like to be, and creating new options for ourselves. On the social level, this means moving towards the world of our dreams. In either case, three things need to be in place:

• Clarity that what is happening is not to our liking, and having a clear sense of what we want instead. Only knowing we don’t like what is will not result in change. We need to have enough faith that something else is indeed possible to imagine mobilizing the resources necessary.
• Having or knowing how to materialize the resources needed to create the change, and trusting our capacity for accessing the resources. Resources here are both internal, in the form of skills, faith, consciousness, courage, presence and the like, as well as external, in the form of support from others, material resources where needed, access to the people with influence and the like. The faith in our capacity to access and mobilize resources is an irreducible part of what’s needed to move towards the change.
• Making the choice to take action. This is not a trivial step. Both personally and collectively we find ourselves in situations where we know we want something done, we know we can do it, and we still choose not to take action. The willingness to commit is the final element that moves us into action.

In the previous parts of this mini-series I have addressed in some detail the question of internal resources I see as necessary for creating nonviolent personal or social change. I do not intend to address the question of external resources, since this is not my expertise. Lastly, I am not, in this moment, focusing on the willingness to commit, which I may take up at another opportunity. In what remains I want to focus on the element of vision which is often sorely lacking in social change movements. I have often wondered what a social movement would do if by some stroke of miracle they became victorious. In my non-expert review of historical example, successful social movements rarely end up implementing systems that are in any fundamental way different from what they replace. Instead of thinking of this phenomenon as proof of how horrible human nature is, I tend to think of it as a cautionary tale with the moral of inviting us to have much clearer vision of what we are attempting to create instead of only working on what we oppose.

For anyone who accepts the radical notion of creating a world based on the principle of meeting needs as the core organizing principle, this means putting energy into envisioning in detail how different systems would work. At one and the same time this act of visioning supports us in knowing what we work for as well as in transforming our consciousness. Specifically, this activity frees us from the paralyzing belief that what is happening is the only possible way that life could be, and opens us in very practical and daily terms to the desire and subsequently the capacity to act differently and become daily agents of change.

Unless we can truly embrace the uncompromising faith that human collaboration is possible, we will secretly continue to believe that in some instances imposition and control are necessary. If we continue to believe that, however unconsciously, we will recreate such structures if we come to power. Here’s a powerful example of this principle. The people who created the Kibbutz movement in Israel were committed to economic equality and to sexual equality. They devoted endless hours to sitting together and envisioning what economic equality would look like, and what kind of institutions would make it possible, and then created those institutions, and sustained economic equality for decades (until unforeseen factors entered the equation, not the topic for now). On the other hand, as far as the evidence that I gathered some years ago shows, they didn’t ever dedicate such energy and time to envisioning sexual equality. As a result, as soon as babies were born, gender role division re-asserted itself by default.   

My own passion and vision is for a world operating on the basis of attending to needs, human and otherwise. Accordingly, my visioning is about what a world operating on needs would look like. For you reading this, you may have different principles or core values that inform your longing for a different world, and I invite you to take the time to reflect on the concrete applications, the nuts and bolts of what you are hoping for, and to gather friends and groups to engage in the visioning. I have found that doing visioning is invigorating, generates hope, and contributes to motivation to keep working. Try it out.

In my next post on this topic I provide an example of my personal visioning in the economic sphere.