Show Notes
Tim: We've had the remarkable opportunity to interview Carolyn Townsend and Pascal Porchet on the pod. It’s so funny to call people clients to me because in our line of work you build relationships to these people - because you go through a fair amount of hell and high water together - and so it's not as simple as “the client” as that somehow implies that it's a purely transactional relationship which it is not by any stretch of the imagination.
Tim: Pascal Porchet and Carolyn Townsend are very different types and scale of leader. Pascal is the Chief of Operations with 15,000 people underneath him, global reach to what they're doing, in a 150-year old organization that has grown in an incredibly additive way. Carolyn Townsend comes from a communications background and then has just stepped up to lead some incredibly progressive local work across the region on the East Coast of Canada in Nova Scotia… so just like very, very different but quite remarkable in some of the patterns that connected the two of them in how they thought about their work. Maybe that is where we could start.
Tim: One of the things that I think they're both really good at is communicating fundamentally innovative work to a dominant system. They're both incredibly talented. I think we have a lot to learn from them and we had a lot of learning with them.
Tuesday: When I think of Carolyn, that is her superstar skill, right? She can just take the ideas and make them understandable to funders and the public. Pascal was doing that all the time; he was a translator all the time for our work into the organization. For me, when we talk about systems change then that ability to communicate into a dominant system is going to be a skill that needs to be developed… and neither one of them came from a facilitation or systems change backgrounds and it feels maybe quite important, right? So, Pascal came from banking and Carolyn came from communications and sport.
Tuesday: I think it says a couple of things about systems change being a fairly newer field, right? You don't get a bunch of University degrees, people aren't coming in with their Masters in Systems Change to want to work for The Outside, right? So it's a fairly new field and people are coming from different places into it and I think that’s a really exciting place for language to develop because I think ever since I entered this field, people have been talking about the language and how it doesn't work and how it's too obtuse and these two people… part of their role and part of their success has been their ability to communicate in dominant systems.
Tim: One of the things that's come up in our work a lot is, “you have to experience it to understand it.” I mean ever since I started the Art of Hosting, twenty odd years ago now, it was like, “I can't really explain to you. You've just got to come along.” We’ve said on the pod before that that's an insufficient way to approach the scale and scope of work that we get invited to, or bluntly, that just needs to be done in the world right now. What I will say is that both Carolyn and Pascal were transformed by the experience - intellectually and personally - like conceptually challenged some of the kind of beliefs and understandings of how change could happen. Personally, both of these people went through major personal transformations in tandem with the work we were doing. It was the experience that fuelled their ability to articulate it.
Tuesday: Stay with me for a minute - I am just going to do a little meander. Carolyn's skill is communications, and she's so good at it… but it's a skill she came into it with. She had a transformation. She was probably looking for words to describe what was happening for her and the work. Pascal, I think, coming from banking, was really clear, when he talked with us, was being in very different environments - different countries, different roles. He's a Swiss, French speaking man who had to adapt and figure out how to communicate, how to connect and how to get work done in such a variety of places that it feels like that may be why he's able to translate?! His role for 15 years out in the field was translation to different kinds of people and so why I said, come with me, is that that makes sense to me but it really also supports our work in equity when we talk about people.
Tuesday: When we talk about people, especially folks who have had less access, being able to translate or bridge in a way because they've actually had to walk in multiple worlds in their lives. This is also a case for diversity and equity work in that people who have had to navigate different circumstances will maybe be more able to communicate this work. I know it's a little bit of a leak but that just occurred to me - there's something really important here around different experiences too.
Tim: It feels like such common sense what you're saying. In some ways a training in systems change or a Masters in Systems Change may actually not be the best thing. The best thing is to go and have as many varied and diverse experiences of life as possible and then do the work. We often find ourselves in a dialogue about how much of the training out there, both in this field and around equity, actually only serves to further entrench people. It only serves to further polarize or to further isolate, when actually the whole point of this work is the opposite of that. The whole point of this work is to generate curiosity and understanding and desire to act in relationship to people who are fundamentally different than you. It's almost like the more you think you've studied it to the point where you know what you're doing, the less helpful you are.
Tim: Diversity of experiences is the BEST training. It’s the best training to be in relationships. It’s the best training to be able to find language that is able to communicate what you're doing. This type of work demands some real kind of optimism and faith. That by its nature is quite a vulnerable place to put yourself… and that can lead to personal transformation.
Tuesday: Systems change - as exciting, as exhilarating, as audacious and as ambitious - it is just what life is which means it is disheartening, heartbreaking, horribly disappointing, terrifying, right? So when we get in, we have to expect the other. Systems change, if you're in it, builds the capacity for the heartbreak or the capacity to be with it… but it also builds the capacity to hope and have that audaciousness.
Tues: “There are really good people in broken systems” - I must say that all of the time. When people are feeling down or negative, when people are talking about how terrible the world is going and how awful things are I tend to say, “yeah I I know that to be true and yet I work with amazing people doing good stuff every day.” It's quite hard for me to feel that everything's going to hell in a hand-basket because I'm working with such good people all the time, every day. My reality is these are good people in broken systems and yes - the broken systems might win and the people who are not good in the systems might win… but if I look at what’s in front of me, if I look at Carolyn Townsend and Pascal Porchet and all of the other people we've talked to this season; these are good people in broken systems but they're trying, they're giving it. They're giving it a go and I don't know what else could give me hope in these times. So I'm hoping that the listeners also feel that.
Resources:
Learn more about, and follow, The Outside by visiting and liking all of our channels:
Website: www.findtheoutside.com
Facebook & Instagram: @findtheoutside
Listen to our interview with Pascal Porchet
Listen to our interview with Carolyn Townsend
Musician, John Grant
Listen to our podcasts with Adam Kahane, Arawana Hayashi and Margaret Wheatley.
Shout out to Peter Rost - thanks for listening and connecting with us! :)
Listen to our Heartbreak podcast episode from Season 1.
Check out The Outside’s LinkedIn Article: “The Conversational Nature of Reality.”
Poem from David Whyte:
“First of all, one of the powerful dynamics of leadership is being visible. One of the vulnerabilities of being visible is that when you’re visible, you can be seen. And when you can be seen, you can be touched. And when you can be touched, you can be hurt.”Book: “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” by Richard Bach
Quote from book: “ One of the original sins is to limit the is. Don’t.”
Quote from Thomas Merton: “Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”