Lankelly Chase were courageous and willing to get it wrong

But what lives in the shadow of courage?

 

By Dorothy Atcheson 

 

 

My introduction to Lankelly Chase was in coaching one of the directors. After we’d been working together for a while, they brought me in to work with the whole core team of about 14 people.

 

At the same time, they were also training in CoResolve, Myrna Lewis’s method of Deep Democracy, which Lankelly and its partners are very engaged in. Deep Democracy is a process that allows all the voices in a system to be heard on various subjects, usually contentious subjects, looking to get information into a system that otherwise isn’t in the system because people are afraid of conflict, or they’re doing it in a way that’s harmful. It can be quite confronting.

 

At the point I met them, they were somewhat conflict averse as an organisation. Going into CoResolve and going into systems coaching meant that they were really in a process of trying to live by what they had just come up with as the ‘system behaviours’. I think they had about 12 different behaviours, which they had on a wall, which included things like ‘all the voices in a system need to be heard’ and ‘power should be equally distributed’. It was all about sharing power, accountability and responsibility, and hearing from everybody. 

 

Myself and a colleague worked with them over a period of just over a year, as a whole system, to explore what was emerging within their team and how they could become an organisation that lived by those system behaviours. 

 

Willing to get it wrong

 

Most people working in organisations are so busy they can barely see the wood for the trees. Lankelly was really investing time, money and energy into how they might work together differently and how they could live by this set of systems behaviours they’d come up with. 

 

We also worked with them to see themselves within their larger system as well. Overall, I think it was a good experience for them. They appreciated working with themselves as a system, as opposed to a group of individuals. They still were left with a lot of complexity because they’re working probably in one of the most complex ways you can work on severe and multiple disadvantage.

 

I see Lankelly as pioneering, trailblazing, aspirational – willing to go out there, willing to get it wrong, trying hard, not always succeeding, but trying to lead by example. And probably getting custard pie in their face as much as they get accolades. I don’t think they’re out there crowing about how wonderful they are either. They’re trying to live the work.

 

Rank and race

 

Lankelly wanted to change their governance. They had a head of the trustee board who was a systems change person himself, and they had somebody with lived experience on the board. They were seeking feedback from their community, which is great and laudable and confusing. They convened a meeting in Sheffield, and I and one of the directors were asked to facilitate. 

 

At that meeting, it became very clear that race was an issue that Lankelly wasn’t dealing with. We were two white women facilitating an event that had at least half people of colour from different partner organisations. There was a sense that we had used our rank unskillfully by not recognising what was trying to be, and that Lankelly was using its rank unskillfully by not recognising some of the paradigms around philanthropic giving, who they were giving to and the makeup of the people in the organisation. That was a big change for the organisation. 

 

Lankelly invited some of the people who were interested from that meeting to talk about things like reparation. Then they invited some of the people who were at that meeting to join the board and get involved in changing the governance structure. I’ve had less involvement with them since then, but the whole decision to change how they do funding feels like it came partly out of that experience. 

 

Responsibility and accountability get kicked along

 

Decision-making felt like it was difficult at Lankelly, because if you’re going to devolve power and devolve decision-making, then how do decisions get made? 

 

My sense – it’s not unique to Lankelly, but it felt particularly strong – is that responsibility gets kicked along. Accountability gets kicked along. When you give people with lived experience lots of responsibility and accountability, all of a sudden, that’s not the paradigm they might be used to. What are the things that enable that to happen skillfully? 

 

I started to see that the whole philanthropic model is not good. It’s a drama triangle – it’s a victim-rescuer-perpetrator triangle. So hats off to Lankelly for trying to disrupt that. I think it’s messy. I’m not sure they ever got to grips with responsibility and accountability, and where it lives in the system. 

 

Paradoxes

 

I always saw Lankelly as courageous. The paradox is, I think there’s also cowardice there – it lives in the paradigm of being very courageous that you would also be a coward somewhere.

 

I think the trustee board challenged the core team: ‘Come on, we’ve got to get more money out the door. You’ve got all these people with a need.’ I’m interested in what lives in the shadow of being courageous – risk-taking in some ways and not in others.

 

The drama triangle lives everywhere, but I hadn’t seen it in the philanthropic model so starkly as when having worked with Lankelly. You could really see it. And there are systemic patterns over many generations as well. 

 

Even when we want to be different, we find ourselves inducted into the energy of systemic patterns. 

 

Creating the conditions for generative conversation – and conflict

 

I hope other resource holders might take an example from Lankelly recognising its own rank, power and privilege in the system, and in the system of philanthropy and in the system of its own philanthropy, and create the conditions for generative conversation and conflict.

 

I’m taught conflict is a sign of change trying to happen. When that change is particularly crunchy, then the conflict is as well. We’re mostly conflict avoidant, I think. People, generally speaking, would rather not do it because we don’t want to hurt other people. We don’t want to get turfed out and we have experience of hurting and having been hurt. 

 

Yet through the conflict that usually emerges by taking polarised positions – this is why I love Deep Democracy, and Co-Resolve does this too – you get new information and new awareness, and that is usually something you can work with and create from. I think if other organisations did that, they would start to move beyond traditional paradigms.

 

I’d like to see resource holders having more generative conversations and hearing from more voices in their system so that they could do something differently. And I would like to see anybody, whether they’re resource holders or not, be in conversation about how to work together differently. 

 

 

Story Weaving by Peter Pula and Sam Walby

 

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