WRITINGS

We have new opportunities to create the world our hearts now is possible, and we are still facing systemic violence and ecological disaster.

Designing processes to create meaningful change and powerful statements.

A more nuanced understanding of hierarchy, and how it can be used to support equitable shared leadership.

A list of resources to help orient and navigate the world we find ourselves in.

Video calls are a great way for us to connect, communicate, and collaborate across distances. They are also a great way for us to continuously stare at a computer all day as we multiply the effects of meeting fatigue, screen fatigue, and social isolation.

What exactly do I do? I help us shed the skin of broken systems; and step into new ways of being, leading, and working together.

There is no such thing as leadership. There is only following. And there is only one question: What are you following?

Every day more organizations are reimagining how they work together. People feel the pains, inefficiencies, and contradictions of the rigidly hierarchical systems that pervaded 20th-century organizations, and they sense that there is a way to bring more passion, humanity, creativity, and fulfillment into our work.

Power is complicated. It doesn’t just reside in the people with formal roles and titles. So eliminating formal power hierarchies doesn’t actually eliminate the other forms of hierarchies that can exclude, coerce, or dominate your organization.

Transitioning to self-management is like taking the training wheels off of a bike. Those training wheels were really offering some support and stability, so taking them off will create some needs.

Most of us have learned to avoid directly communicating about our experiences and perspectives. We rarely speak about our lived and emotional experience in a moment and we have trained ourselves not to respond to or move from our embodied feelings.

Self-management is hard. That’s because self-management isn’t just a different way to allocate tasks, distribute labor, and make decisions.

Humans are truly amazing creatures. We can reason and deduce. We can intuit and feel. We have an innate desire to expand ourselves to understand more complexity, assume more responsibility, make bigger contributions, and develop into an ideal version of our selves that we can now just barely glimpse even in the moments of our greatest clarity.

Beyond patriarchy there is love. Real love. The kind of love that renders words inadequate and time malleable. The kind of love that reminds us that “open hearted” is not a metaphor, but a literal description of a way to be in our bodies.

We exist within a system of global violence that forces us into relationships of domination with each other. It creates a situation where the material safety of some is dependent on the oppression of others; where life energy is extracted for profit; and where the means of human existence entail the destruction of the planet.