When things don't make sense... and we still reproduce them in our smaller ecosystems

(I originally wrote and published this on my previous blog at Substack on December 7, 2023. Enjoy!)

Every day I struggle with things not making sense. I look at mainstream media reporting or the lack thereof and I wonder what the point is. I mean, I’m learning hard lessons about what the point is, it’s profit and greed, as always - the thing I’m struggling with is understanding how we can keep prioritising profit and greed above all else.

So I did what I always do with my despair. Channeled it into something constructive. And I’ll get there, yes. But first, let’s to talk about how…

None of it makes sense

It's not that we can't keep going the exact same way we have been doing things for the past couple centuries. It's just that we're headed for complete self-destruction as a short-term result at this point.

So from where I'm standing, it makes zero sense to keep going down this road. It makes zero sense to keep violently exploiting the Democratic Republic of Congo and other countries and communities in Africa, displacing and murdering people to exploit their regional natural resources for our western greed and love of gadgets and illusion of innovation and progress. (I mean I guess it is progress, just towards complete self-destruction.)

It makes zero sense to bomb Palestine into oblivion, using our collective western guilt together with our conditioned hatred and disregard of brown people as a vehicle of propaganda and justification for it. It makes zero sense to prioritise tapping into the natural resources in the area over the lives of the people living there.

Colonialism never ended. The west is still going strong, doing the exact same things it has been doing for the past few centuries, we just adapted our narratives and justifications to fit the digital age better.

There are countless such things happening worldwide. None of them make any sense under the assumption that we, humans, would still like to be around in a hundred years. Because the destruction of the people of the Global South is self-destruction. The only reason not to see it that way is if we don’t see ourselves as part of the same humanity as the people whose destruction we enable with our every day actions.

It’s by design

All of this is by the design of colonialism. This article about the modern empire by Priya Satia was one of the most insightful things I’ve read all year.

White supremacy is not some nebulous concept. It’s in all of us. It’s in the way we use language, the way we behave in our everyday life, who we instinctively believe, whose wellbeing we care about. It’s in the way we create our spaces. It’s in the way we collaborate (or don’t), the very way we construct and perceive professionalism.

It’s the reason why most DEI initiatives aren’t really leading to substantial systemic improvement, if you’ll allow me to be brutally frank for a second. Companies keep hiring people with little knowledge or skills in DEI, taking their passion and good will as proof that they can do the job. Gatekeeping is bullshit, but standards aren’t. If DEI was held to similar standards of outcome as most other professions, we’d be seeing results. But we’re having the exact same conversations we had half a decade ago when I first entered the field.

If DEI wasn’t mostly just used for PR purposes, we’d also see DEI aimed at work environments beyond the office. We’d see it in bakeries, on the factory floor, helping miners, construction workers, interns, grocery store clerks, nurses, you name it.

But we don’t, because it’s not about outcome and it’s not about making employees’ lives better. It’s about performance, while it’s also a performance, and this is visible in both who we deem worthy of the DEI illusion effort (i.e., white-collar workers) and our absolute lack of standards for it.

Roles

So I’m thinking. Chances are, you’re thinking, too. Do I have any of the answers to the big questions?

No. Obviously not.

The magic of it is, though, that I don’t have to. We have to find the answers, together. It’s not ever going to be the work of one individual saviour. We’ve constructed our histories to celebrate that one person for discovering this and that, like how everything floated around aimlessly before Newton figured out how to chuck an apple at his own head*. The way we tell our history, we completely ignore that not only did the great explorers and inventors build on (or at times perhaps copied) knowledge unearthed before world-wide, but that they had entire communities and networks of teachers, students, peers, supporters who made their discoveries possible in the first place.

No one person will come to the rescue with The Answer. We will have to find our own answers (plural), specific to our communities while at the same time communicable and compatible with the needs of other communities.

We need to be able to create spaces where collaboration is the norm, both internally and externally.

So that’s where I found the value of my work. I am a researcher, an educator, a facilitator, an experimenter, a systems-thinker. I am constantly on the search for ways of doing things better while causing less harm to the people we’re doing those things with. That’s the value I bring to the table.

The focus of my work has always been reducing harm, creating spaces of respect, solving the mystery of collaboration and addressing the inherent toxicity of our mainstream organisational practices. And after a lot of hours of research and idea mapping and talking to others, I can now finally distil it into words.

My work is about co-creating structural trust.

I work best with early-stage and purpose-led teams, because those are the spaces I have first hand experience with, and deep knowledge of. It doesn’t solve all our issues in organisational spaces (nor does it have to!), but it is a piece of a big wide puzzle, and I treat it accordingly.

So if you, like me, feel in your gut that things are just… wrong, and you’re ready to try new approaches instead of reproducing all this toxic nonsense within your own organisation, take a look at my website or reach out at we.are@initforchange.com.

And if you know others in the same boat, share this piece of writing with them. We’re not alone. I firmly believe this and I refuse to give up hope for a better future for all of us.

So let’s fucking co-create it.

Cheers,

Emil

PS. Thanks to Jordan Beltran on Unsplash for the cover photo.

*This is a joke!