Living the questions: The Forgiveness Project
A story of living systemic practice and governance
with contribution and comments from Rachel Bird (Director) and the wider staff and board
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, is one of those quotes you hear a lot but what does it mean to operate from this insight? I would also say that for the communities and people exploring ways of organising, the soft dimensions of how we organise — the relational power dynamics, the deeper intentions and ways of being we operate from (from which culture emerges) also eclipse the structural elements of strategy, organisational forms, policies and practices.
This insight has been known but also I feel I have lived through it. I have been a trustee of The Forgiveness Project (TFP) for many years now and seen it move and change through many different phases, sometimes taking a more active role and other times less involved.
This article tells some of the background stories, the ones that are often not seen or felt.
The Forgiveness Project at its inception in 2004 was always a place of storytelling, founded by Marina Cantacuzino, a journalist, it sought to collect and share stories from both victims/survivors and perpetrators to explore alternatives to vengeance and violence.
These stories are restorative narratives, stories that show how people and communities are learning to rebuild and recover after incidents of harm. Restorative narratives go much further than human interest stories; they address harsh realities and show meaningful progression whether from revenge to forgiveness, or hopelessness to meaning-making. In a society where the media focuses on tragedy and devastation (often without thought to the way this can re-traumatise and divide), TFP redresses the balance by sharing stories with an emphasis on recovery and restoration.
For this reason, working with restorative narratives in itself, for me, is a systemic approach to change, as these stories can not only change individuals, but also how we relate to each other and understand our world . These stories help us start conversations about how we live our lives and why it matters, they help us see that change is possible, and guide us to a more relational way of being in the world. By nudging the narrative of society, from the story where we see ourselves as atomised, selfish and small, to an alternative narrative, that sees us as connected, that we all matter — can change the foundation of society and ripple through to relational and individual transformation.
However this story is seeking to not talk about the systemic strategy externally — although I will return to that later — but more how its culture and approach is mirrored in how it governs, runs and organises itself.
The story takes us back to 2015 — when we were facing a dilemma as an organisation about how we transition. After ten years of being a founder-led organisation, there was a need to shift Marina’s role and explore how TFP could be develop beyond Marina.This challenge is faced by many organisations and in traditional ways of organising the board determines the way forward. Our approach as a board was to seek to recruit a new Managing/Executive Director for the organisation, I think at one point we even titled the role Chief Executive, to fit with what we normally see — the need to have a leader at the helm, to guide, transition and take us forward as an organisation. I was part of the recruiting sub-committee supporting the process. Over the course of two years we managed to recruit two different people, however the fit and ways of working in such a small and unique organisation did not fit, it felt like tensions were bubbling and a rift was developing between the team and the trustees. Trust was being lost and we had reached a crunch point. A crisis meeting was held between the board and the staff.
A core practice of The Forgiveness Project is people listening to each other and being ‘in circle’, instigated by our programme manager, so we were invited to sit in a circle together. There was a long session with the board and staff sitting together and listening to each other, well into the evening; taking the time needed to hear the frustration and anger of the staff and reflecting on the practice and behaviour of the board. It was a moment for the board to ask the question of themselves: what is the nature of board leadership and how might we like to reset? It looked at how the board was there to serve the staff’s needs and the organisational purpose and not to imprint their own ideas and vision. This shifted the practice of the board to be an enabling force of the organisation. More importantly it was a pivotal moment to really lean into a different cultural way of working, living out our values and deeper worldview, making this explicit to ourselves. I invite you to pause at this moment to take that in, as we had to in that meeting. To not just read over the words and hear “values” and “worldview” but to see if you can feel the shift. These reflections speak to what this felt like at the time and in the shift afterwards:
“I remember the meeting felt both a relief and a release. So much difficult stuff had happened. Many of the decisions we’d made to transition from founder led to professionally led had ultimately been the wrong ones. Now at this meeting the board and staff were on equal footing, able to ask the most fundamental of questions — what would it take to create an effective organisation where all could contribute and flourish. I came away from that meeting feeling excited again.” Marina Cantacuzino
‘Until this meeting, the Board and Team felt like completely separate entities — bridged only by the Director at quarterly meetings. There was no understanding of the different responsibilities we were each assuming — nor any sense of who we were as people behind our roles. This meeting was the beginning of a new way of being — an understanding and appreciation of our different perspectives, a belief that we are all here because of The Forgiveness Project and we are all here for each other. We began to trust each other and develop a more relational way of being — a values led culture embedded in openness, exploration and emergence. From initiating small steps such as each trustee mentoring and building a relationship with a team member we soon shifted our whole operating model from ‘collecting and sharing stories’ to ‘working with a community of storytellers’. We now understand this relational approach as not only the foundation of our culture but also the heart of our approach.” Rachel Bird
For me it was also a moment to really challenge myself about my own leadership mindset, I had felt the weight of being a trustee, as if I had to solve, take charge, give direction. Even though I understood we needed a different way, I realised I wasn’t practising it as a trustee and was getting caught in the expectations of what I thought the role required. This situation gave me a moment too to pause and to reconstellate my own view of my role in the situation.
As a consequence of this meeting we went on a journey of developing and investing in our then project coordinator, Rachel Bird, towards being the Director that she now is today — adapting and playing to her strengths. We created approaches to leadership that fitted with the strengths we had in the team and board, not assuming that a Director also needed to be the main spokesperson or be the sole owner of the organisation’s mission. Supporting the organisation to redefine what we mean by leadership and the roles and positions we take. The board, through this journey, took on an enabling role, supporting the organisation to flourish into its next phase. This philosophy and way of working has been shared when recruiting new board members.
“Having only joined as a Trustee relatively recently, I have no quotes to offer from what sounds like a special meeting. What I do know is that one of the main foci of my conversations with Rachel is highlighting that the Board is there to support and enable her rather than her needing to have all answers to her questions pre-formulated. It is such an interesting awareness (on my part) of how, almost hard-wired, our inner picture of leadership is even when there is a clear philosophical belief otherwise.” Ann David, now Co-chair of Board
This approach served us well when the pandemic hit a few years later. Not only were we seeking to truly live our values in how we govern and lead (as well as through our strategy) but also taking an adaptive approach. One example of responding to where we were and what was needed was deciding not to grow as a route to wider impact, but instead to recognise that size does not always dictate what wider contribution you might have, rather contributing through the depth of inquiry and the new seeds we might plant and amplify through networks and communications. To right size our evolution.
As the landscape changed abruptly — both in terms of available funding and what programmes we could offer (for example not being able to run courses in prison and host live events) — we faced financial difficulty, as well as seeing the need to pay attention to the well-being of staff. We approached these challenges as a staff and board with inclusive and respectful decision making, really listening to what was needed, not rushing too fast to solving the problem but re-grouping slowly and investing some of our reserves in the process of figuring out the best course for us to take. Again we did a lot of listening — to what was being called for us to do, listening to the staff, to our storytellers and what the world was asking of us through this time. We had tough conversations about the possibility of closing the project. What I noticed was not that we had these conversations but the nature in which we had them, with real loving care for the staff but also a feeling of we were in this together. We were navigating this uncertainty in the open, we had cultivated the trusting relationships to now do that. We also agreed to actively experiment with possible approaches and ways of working as an active strategy in resilience and figuring out the way forward — seeing what might work — from courses to podcasts to exploring new narratives and stories.
So it’s now 2023, where has this story taken us. The story is far from over, but we are opening up a new chapter or perhaps walking a new path. Covid had given us space for a new organisation to emerge, alongside our investment in our leadership and staff over eight years. We are sitting together looking at the next phase proposed by Rachel, who had been really listening to what was calling us forward (also showing how she is stepping into a new leadership for herself). Rachel is curating and mapping where we might go, in a difficult funding landscape and where we also want to have long term sustainability with and beyond the current configuration of staff, taking a deeply relational approach; building a model based on our experiments and experience over the last 3 years and building for future potential.
The overall focus of the work remains the same, working with restorative narratives to understand what it takes to heal, restore and re-humanise ourselves and our communities. It is not so much a shift but an evolution. We will now bring in new stories through new explorations, bringing new perspectives and working through our new ‘explorers model’, people who are living into the questions of forgiveness, in different mediums, bringing the work and these ideas to new audiences- an evolution that has been cultivated and owned by us all together.
We are now ready to breathe out, after putting down strong roots, the seeding of new narratives through these explorations to see where they land, stories on shame, self-forgiveness, writing to heal and our living stories are ones that are currently emerging. So watch (and join us) in this space as we head towards our twentieth year.
One of my favorite quotes by Rilke I use all the time in our programmes (at the School of System Change) when introducing inquiry as a core systemic practice was introduced to me by Marina (in her book) — about loving the questions. I think it’s fitting to end this article, as I feel we have lived into the questions through how we govern, how we lead, how we organise ourselves for change — through challenges and uncertainty. I really feel a great honour to have played a small part in this journey of living into the questions that we face, not just in the world but also as an organisation.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” Rainer Maria Rilke
