Reflections on Issue Twenty-Three

Small Wins & Big Victories

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Thank you to everyone who had a chance to read Issue Twenty-Three over the past week. For those who have yet to read it, the reflections from other readers below may be a good starting point, or you can read “Small Wins & Big Victories” first.

The Understory reflections between issues are intended to share thoughtful comments from subscribers that expand upon and challenge parts of the previous issue. I am immensely grateful for the comments added this week, and hope they provide further value in thinking about your own theory of change, and how you might create the future you desire to see in the world.

As Shared by Douglas Capelin

"‘If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.’ This familiar phrase from the 60's is catchy and indisputable, but I have never quite known what to do with it. Thank you, Adam, for Issue Twenty-Three which provides us with the context, dare I say 'permission', to ‘bring forth change’ with ‘our natural gifts and proclivities.’”

I found this comment from Doug fascinating. The solution/problem quote was one of the most iconic calls to action from the 1960s’. It seemed profoundly effective in making people aware that complacency was the same as complicity. But then what?

After publishing Issue Twenty-Three I listened to the interview Renée Lertzman gave on WBUR just a few days before. She was asked for a prescription of what someone should do in the face of a warming planet. And with total aplomb, she resisted answering on a couple of fronts. The first is that climate change is too complex an issue to have a single prescription. The second is the part that I’ve been thinking about for some time. By offering a prescription we limit the creativity by which someone approaches their actions. Instead of allowing action to emerge based on a process of discovering personal meaning and conviction, a prescription short circuits the entire psychological process. Since it is a consciousness shift rather than just a simple behavioural one that we need, I stand firmly with Renée on the side of resisting prescriptions. Just like small wins, a process of discovery takes longer and is messier, but its cumulative effects are far greater than following a checklist of prescribed behaviours to complete.

Doug and I also had a bit of a back and forth this week about how integral his camp, Deer Hill Expeditions, was to my own journey. If you have a teenager, I encourage you to check it out and reach out to Doug.

See Doug’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to his

As Shared by Monique Morden

“My software DNA modified your small wins concept into scalable small wins. If we could find those small wins and spread those to other people, regions, governments, then we could get lots of small wins creating more momentum. Part of the beauty and magic of creating a movement and giving that movement a roadmap.”

I too found Karl Weick’s concept of “packaging” small wins very powerful. Instead of viewing small wins independently, he offers us the ability to see in hindsight what is impossible to see in real-time: how small wins combine to become part of a larger whole or movement. Weick describes a kind of patterning that takes place over time. New allies join together, opponents lessen, and conditions become more favourable for further small wins. As Weick defines it, “small wins are controllable opportunities that produce visible results.” While the success of small wins is visible, the patterns that connect them into packages of big victories are often invisible.

Does the bee sense a nest or just a series of hexagonal prismatic cells filled with honey and pollen? 

See Monique’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to hers

As Shared by Mitch Taylor

“I feel comforted by the fact that my age and stage makes it a lot easier to take the Small Wins approach and not to feel too guilty for being unable to effectively contribute to Big Victories. I am heartened though to see the Big Victory path that President Biden has set the USA onto. His leadership gives me growing confidence that global Climate Change Action can progress much more rapidly now, and we can individually contribute our Small Wins to the cause. This hope can be incredibly transformative for a family, a community and a nation, and will result in real change.”

In writing Issue Twenty-Three I too was grappling with my own age. The fifteen-year-old activist speaking to the forty-four-year-old husband to one, father to two, and multiplicity of other roles and responsibilities. My hope, and perhaps yours too, Mitch, is about the long arc of our lives. We are but momentary specs in human time and statistically non-existent in geological time. In a lifetime we hope to have participated in meaningful small wins that perhaps accumulate to a big victory. What I have come to appreciate is that our ability to make change depends on our internal condition and how it is nurtured throughout our lives. Howard Thurman beautifully summed this up in his elevation of the mind and spirit as enablers of possibility:

“Often there are things on the horizon that point logically to a transformation of society, especially for the underprivileged, but he cannot co-operate with them because he is spiritually or intellectually confused. He mistakes fear for caution and caution for fear. Now, if his mind is free and his spirit unchained, he can work intelligently and courageously for a new day.”

See Mitch’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to his

As Shared by Peter Tavernise

“Tempered radicals. Thank you for giving a name for what I have somehow instinctively embodied (not having an MBA, but simply being in the milieu). At the same time, what appears to be happening is that many of those tempered folks are going truly radical and visiting the edges in their own inner work. With the fundamental assumption being that if enough of us change at fundamental levels we cannot help but affect the aggregate being, the collective consciousness, in ways that could rapidly spread. Limbic resonance, emotional co-regulation, and peer-influence are all extremely powerful effects.

The system will be disrupted, is being disrupted, radically by Gaia herself. We no longer have to push that, it is happening of its own accord. We can be there with alternatives to offer those who are ready to try something new. We can be there with open arms, with deep imagination, with ways of sitting with and even loving uncertainty as part of the promise of truly healing all our traumas—those we have wrought upon ourselves, upon others, upon the land. We can remember we are full human bodies alive as part of Gaia. The journey of Reconnection begins with each of us, one at a time.”

I read this comment by Peter as an invitation to double-back on both Meyerson’s and DeChristopher’s thinking about the importance of our coordinates in a system or organization. In 1995 Meyerson wrote, “Change often comes from the margins of an organization, borne by those who do not fit well.” DeChristopher advocates for pushing from the margins rather than from the centre.

The nuance that Peter added that is so greatly appreciated is that the inner work for changemakers often comes at the edges and then is brought into the centre. This refers directly to what Jennifer Harvey Sallin added in her comment on the previous issue about rewilding ourselves. Perhaps this is the key to maintaining that balance along an organization’s fault line. To be a quiet leader working slowly within the centre of an organization takes patience and resilience. It is by first moving outwards to come back to the centre where the precarity of being en pointe becomes stabilized. 

The comment also brought to mind David Abram’s observations of the physical proximity of shamans to their villages in Nepal and Indonesia as shared in The Spell of the Sensuous. Abram found that magicians rarely dwell at the heart of a village. Instead, they often lived among the rice fields and in the forests—at the spatial periphery of their communities. Abram’s first assumption was that this spatial decision was to maintain a degree of privacy to avoid being inundated with healing requests for small maladies. But on closer examination he found that:

“It seems to serve another purpose as well, providing a spatial expression of his or her symbolic position with regard to the community. For the magician’s intelligence is not encompassed within society; its place is at the edge of the community, mediating between the human community and the larger community of beings upon which the village depends for its nourishment and sustenance...The traditional or tribal shaman, I came to discern, acts as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field, ensuring that there is an appropriate flow of nourishment, not just from the landscape to the human inhabitants, but from the human community back to the local earth...And it is only as a result of her continual engagement with the animate powers that dwell beyond the human community that the traditional magician is able to alleviate many individual illnesses that arise within the community. The sorcerer derives her ability to cure ailments from her more continuous practice of ‘healing’ or balancing the community’s relation to the surrounding land.”

What Abrams suggests is that our very capabilities to make change, to heal, is contingent upon this relationship between inside and outside. I think this is not only a helpful addition to Meyerson’s research but also aids in understanding our role as nature-based coaches/guides in being the intermediary between worlds. We have the weighty responsibility of being connectors not just between individuals and their organizations and communities, but to broader life itself—the diverse plants and animals, wind and weather patterns, and various landforms of forests, rivers, caves, and mountains that Abram describes.

“In speaking with Julia Kim this week (with thanks to Charles Homes) she said ‘we are finding each other.’ And her efforts speak volumes about what is possible when working from such a holistically deep inner/outer perspective. As to us finding each other—with that kind of peer network organically forming across and between organizations, perhaps there will be new models of collaborative leadership, moving and leading from fundamentally different value sets, mindframes, ways of being in and as the world.

I’d like to piggyback on this comment to invite readers of The Understory to do exactly what Peter is suggesting next week. On May 6th, Solvable is hosting a conversation between Charles Holmes and Julia Kim on well-being and gross national happiness. It’s free to join and designed to strengthen connections with others across the globe. Please register here.

See Peter’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to his

As Shared by Anne-Marie Brest

“To support the points you are making in this issue, I would like to offer the following poem by Jane Hirshfield; it was part of my event last Saturday and generated great exchanges on the same topic of ‘small wins vs. big victories.’ 

(No Wind, No Rain)       

No wind, no rain,
the tree
just fell, as a piece of fruit does.

But no, not fruit. Not ripe.
Not fell.

It broke. It shattered.

One cone’s
addition of resinous cell-sap,
one small-bodied bird
arriving to tap for a beetle.

It shattered.

What word, what act,
was it we thought did not matter?

A perfect close, Anne-Marie, thank you. I am going to resist sharing most of my interpretations of the poem to create the space for everyone else. I appreciate the gift of what “we thought did not matter.” It’s impossible to know.

See Anne-Marie’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to hers

I hope this time between issues provides the space for further discovery and reflection. Go forth and make a difference in the weeks ahead. As you may have noticed, I’ve needed a bit more space between issues. See you in two weeks with Issue Twenty-Four.

Adam

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Why I Write The Understory

We have crossed the climate-change threshold from emerging to urgent, which demands a transformative response. The complexity of climate change demands continued focus and the courage to take bold action. I've found that the persistence of climate consciousness improves resilience to the noise and distractions of daily life in service of a bigger (and most of the time invisible) long-term cause.

The Understory is my way of organizing the natural and human-made curiosities that are presently altering my worldview. Within the words, research, and actions of others lies the inspiration for personal and organizational journeys. I hope that my work here helps to inform not just my persistent consciousness but yours as well.