Episode 3.19: Stop, Collaborate + Listen
THE PODCAST: June 22, 2021
TO IS HERE WITH THE FINALE EDITION
Season three’s final episode has Tim and Tuesday reflecting on the impact of COVID on our lives and work. What do we need to shed to truly renew? Season three ends with a bang!
Together, Tim Merry and Tuesday Ryan-Hart are THE OUTSIDE—systems change and equity strategists who bring the fresh air necessary to organize movements, organizations, and collaborators forward for progress, surfacing new mindsets for greater participation and shared impact.
3.19 — SHOW NOTES
Tuesday: In our final episode of Season 3, we talk about the past year of our podcasting - where we were at the beginning of the season, versus where we are now, how COVID has impacted us and our work and our own perspective on our work. And we've talked a little bit around what we'd like to take as we move out of this kind of dark night of COVID.
Tim: And we leave you with a question for the summer too, because that just feels delicious. And then we'll be heading into Season 4 and it some delicious elements to it. Of course, Tim and Tuesday will continue in the conversations we have with each other. We'll also be inviting in a whole series of interviews for people to come in. So there'll be hosted and planned interviews with various speakers. Many of them kind of leading lights in the field of systems change and leading lights in the field of equity. We're very excited to initiate that part of the pod. And then we're also going to be bringing in the work very deliberately Season 4. There’ll be episodes where we focus on a particular element of the work or a particular project we're working on, or a particular discovery made. So you'll hear three quite distinct types of episodes next year, you'll hear ‘Tim and Tuesday Rambling’, you'll hear kind of ‘Table Talks’ where we're bringing in speakers and thought leaders. And then you will also hear an ‘at work’ where we're bringing in some of the very concrete practical stuff we're either doing within The Outside or we're doing in relationship to clients out in the world.
Tuesday: Every year, we've done a little reflecting back on the year of work and the year of podcasting, and then kind of set a little bit of homework even for the listener over the summer. Do you remember that last year, we said “stay woven” and in Season 1, we left the listener with a question to ponder over the summer. And so the task ahead of us is to kind of wrap up this season, and then give people a little something for over the summer until we begin recording again this fall.
Tim: I'm looking forward to reflecting back on a year that has simultaneously driven me and us and many people I know, inside but also forced a removal of veils in terms of how I view the world outside. We were just talking this morning and really thinking about how this year has been one of development for The Outside. It's been one where we've done an enormous amount of internal growth, really like refitting ourselves to be fit for the kind of future that we want to create, but also the kind of future that's coming. And so that’s exciting to look back on.
Tuesday: Yes, and we started this podcast season last fall saying we were going to reflect and refresh. That was kind of where we were. And I would say certainly, business-wise, and even I think on this podcast, we've done a lot of reflecting and thinking about what the refreshing of our work will be. And so I'm kind of laughing. I'm like, all right, last September, we were still finishing up with a very large client, the work was still very, very intense. But we could see, we could see that it was beginning to space out that we were going to have some time coming up the client work wasn't going to be all that heavy. But I would say I started this podcast season in a fairly close to burnout state of mind.
Tim: Where are you at on the other end of this season, Tues?
Tuesday: I would say it took me several months to feel unclenched, to get everything done and to really close well with a particular client in what had been our biggest work to date. But I think this spring, I've been able to let go of some of that clenching to really just soften a little bit. And so now I would say in relation to the work, I do not feel burnt out, I do not feel overwhelmed, I feel like there's plenty to do, I feel excited about internal work in a way that I just didn't have the brain space for. And I wonder if that's what listeners have been hearing over the season with me? I think I've always been a personally reflective person, but I feel like my own introspection, as I've just gotten more space, has gotten deeper. And I think that's certainly been true on the podcast. We've been really both introspective personally, but I think introspective about The Outside on the podcast, how about you?
Tim: I think I went from being on the brink - at the beginning of this podcast, I was just stepping back from having been working a lot and then experienced some good spaciousness through the fall, and then coming into the beginning of this year - but the last six months have been full on for me with a balance between family and work. And then kids in school and kids out of school, it has been a demanding time. And then in the midst of all of that the incredible evolution of The Outside and what we're doing internally, and the teams we have working on the branding and the business model, and our theory of change. And at the same time, I've had the absolutely delightful job of building kind of a visual language for the business and an icon library, and being able to turn those into visual roadmaps of two years of work. And so I've loved that. And it's been a lot. I'm now at a point where I need a break.
Tuesday: One of the reasons it took me several months to calm down was because COVID was still happening. I had kids in my house schooling the entire school year through March - they did not go back to school until March. And that's really stressful. It's stressful for their little selves, it’s stressful for me trying to figure out how to work and be supportive of them, stressful for all of us to be in the same house for months and months and months and months on end without them being able to see friends and being able to go out. And so like that was just kind of a background stress.
Tim: I find that my relationships with my kids has gone through the roof. The kind of depth and quality and friendship that's just kind of grown out of just being together all the time without any of that kind of break. I love that.
Tuesday: I think part of what's happened this year is that there's no going away - whether it's through parenting or your own internal stuff. I'm just really curious how the opening up, from COVID, might shift how the world kind of reopens up, and what folks want to really keep? I've decided I never want to go the grocery store again.
Tim: Some of these outcomes of this period are actually quite exciting, right? Let's think about some of the changes that have been happening in the world. Have you seen those pictures of before and after in terms of air quality? Or the drop in recorded deaths as a result of pollution, the number of births of marine animals because the shipping lanes haven't been as busy. And then, for the first time ever, we're most likely going to see a global 15% corporation tax. So really, for the first time ever, the likes of Amazon and Google and Microsoft, are going to be subject to a tax that is held through global agreement. And the US has signed on to it. Obviously 15% is too low, but we've never even landed on that, you know, and the agreement says something like 15% or more is what you sign on to as an agreement. Volkswagen is saying that they are only producing electric cars as of 2030, GM - 70% of their production is going to be only electric vehicles by 2030. These are seismic shifts in massive sectors that I think are quite remarkable. There is some sense of accelerated progress towards the kind of society I would hope we're going to live in. And of course, the increased production of electric vehicles means they become more and more affordable, it pushes the production of an infrastructure. Of course, there's the other side of this, which is businesses shutting down in my local community or not opening up - I’m not trying to paint some rosy picture of the other side of it, but it's just it's worth noticing.
Tuesday: I'm interested in how much of some of these changes was caused by the crisis aspect of COVID? And how much was caused by our ability to pause for a second? I know you, in Nova Scotia, did some real work around universal basic income that was absolutely started because of the COVID crisis. I'm really curious, what we might see as ripples out from here. I heard about the mass grave found in Canada and it feels to me like people are more grieving it now than we would have. I feel like our attention is going to some things that actually really deserves our grief and our attention and our focus for more than a 10 second media cycle.
Tim: It's called Truth and Reconciliation in Canada and it just underlines the need for truth. It says, “Hey, we have to see and absorb and accept this truth, this genocidal period in Canadian history.” I often think we rush to reconciliation, and, it’s just like both, you know, it's not sequential, I understand that you don't do truth, and then reconciliation, it's truth and reconciliation.
Tuesday: I was listening to an elder talk yesterday - and so I was really glad you went to Truth and Reconciliation - because that was actually her point. She's like, we've done/we think we are doing all this work on reconciliation, but when you increase the reconciliation, you actually increase the possibility of truth. As we commit more and more to reconciliation, we'll find more truth. And so, maybe I'm wrong, Tim, but I do have a sense that there's something that has been precious during this time, that we could choose to just go right back to normal, pre-COVID or we could choose to kind of stay. I’m actively working to try to stay slow. And so I'm curious to see if we'll be able to stay with that pause - this particular genocidal history that deserves the world's care and attention and acknowledgement… can we just stay with it?
Tim: Maybe the work around reconciliation has built relationships that are just strong enough now to bear some of the truth together? We experience that in our work all the time, you build this fabric of relationships, that then allows a piece of truth to be held together. It is the experience of holding that and seeing that together, that then builds the next layer of depth and trust of relationships for another layer of truth to be taken in and actions to then be built from that.
Tuesday: It underscores my commitment to equity work being relational as well as structural, because often in equity work, there's the right people and the wrong people. The wrong people need to see what's happening and acknowledge it and then atone. And some of that is probably good, but we actually stop the capacity for that if we don't move into relationship. It’s almost like individualism within the collective. Unless we move into relationship, we actually can't bear what needs to happen to be able to take the next step. It's actually the knitting together that will let us see clearly be able to bear it.
Tim: Right. If I think about this coming out of COVID - the journey out - and the kind of relationships that we need, as we journey out, to be able to not just go back to the way things were and the strength that is going to take, because there is no doubt that the way things were definitely favored certain people. The dominant way of doing things is built for self preservation, it isn’t built for reinvention. I think there is going to be something about turning to those who are around us and saying, “Well, maybe we do want something different.” As we turn out, we have to turn to each other.
Tuesday: This really aligns with what we've been talking about this season around the journey to the underworld and what do you need to come out.
Tim: I hesitate to answer because I feel like that's the question. For me, but for all of us right now. What does it take to get through the eye of the needle? What are the parts of us or what are the parts of our organizations? What are the policies we have, or the procedures we have in place or the projects that we've committed to, or the behaviors we have among our families or our teams? Maybe this is a good moment to say, “what needs to be dismissed?”
Tuesday: The question for the summer is: “What do you want to take with you from this learning over the last year? What is it time to let go of? What is it that you've learned that you want to take with you - those mythic weapons? What is it that no longer serves?”
Song: “Small Axe,” by Bob Marley & The Wailers
Poem: “When Giving Is All We Have”, by Alberto Rios
One river gives
Its journey to the next.
We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.
We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.
We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—
Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.
Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:
Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.
You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me
What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made
Something greater from the difference.
Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at podcast@findtheoutside.com.
Find the song we played in today’s show - and every song we’ve played in previous shows - on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.
Duration: 40:02
Produced by: Mark Coffin
Theme music: Gary Blakemore
Episode cover image: source