On discombobulation
Being confused is OK. So is daring to imagine a better world.
To discombobulate (verb):
To cause to be confused emotionally
To cause to be unable to think clearly
Many of us are feeling a little bit of both of these descriptions at the moment. It’s an emotionally confusing time. A time when it can be very difficult to think clearly about the ramifications of what we are going through.
The first thing for us to do is to acknowledge that these are strange times and to show up as people first, rather than professionals or experts. We are all living through the single biggest global transition in our lifetimes. That emotional journey is something that we need to acknowledge. At different times, I’ve been reflecting on — and experiencing — the Kübler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, acceptance. We’re often feeling all these emotions, often on the same day, at different speeds, and cycling ever forwards and backwards between them. We need to acknowledge them, but not be owned by them.
Susan David gave a great talk about how to manage through these times. Among the many great points she made was to remind us that we are not our emotions. We can acknowledge our emotions, we can observe them, but we don’t have to be captured by them. It’s not about trying to suppress them, but it’s acknowledging them and then working through that.
My personal journey over the last month has included making sure my friends and family are safe. Eating well and walking through nature daily. Lots of check-in calls. We started homeschooling a little over a month ago. We’ve been trying to work out what this means for States of Change. We only spun out of Nesta four months ago so we had a lot of assumptions about what this year was going to look like and they’ve been turned upside down. We’ve been ensuring the team is safe and supported and that we’re also there for our community of practice around the world by creating space for us to observe, reflect and move forward. This is the role we’ve chosen to adopt, how we want to show up in this moment.
We’re grieving for all those future plans we thought would happen. And we’re left with a sense of not knowing what the next thing to do is, which might be to do nothing at all. To pause and allow the situation to unfold and emerge. To observe, reflect, to give yourself space.
There’s been a lot of stuff online about how to be super productive in this remote working world and to use this time with all these MOOCs you’ve always planned to do. Actually, it might be that we need to do a little bit less for a moment and listen and watch and observe and let the situation emerge. Or as Dan Hill would say, to slow down.
We are also having to absorb a lot of stress. Stress on systems, institutions, our beliefs and relationships — both personal and professional — and we are stress-testing our assumptions. One of the ways that we are being discombobulated is that we’re living through this moment where many of our deepest held assumptions have been destroyed, or made redundant, or challenged in ways that we’d never anticipated. We need to have the courage and candour to admit that and to step forward through the uncertainty that follows.
Anand Giridharadas from the New York Times posted a great provocation a few weeks ago, which is: what is one thing that you have completely reversed your opinion on as a result of the crisis? It is very easy to look at the crisis and have it reinforce all your pre-existing beliefs. It takes a little bit more courage to acknowledge when it changed your mind about something.
For me, it has been the speed and scale of government response that I have reversed my opinion on. If you told me six months ago that the current national government in Australia would spend $130 billion in 6 months and bankroll 60% of the labour force, I would have asked what you were smoking. But we are in different times and I’m surprised and made hopeful by the fact that ideology hasn’t blinded people to some solutions that needed adopting.
We’ve seen a situation in the last ten years of a hardening of and polarisation in political positions, whether it be an extension of the ‘culture wars’ or on economic ideology. If you asked me whether that polarisation was going to go away or whether it would dissolve as rapidly as it had, I would have found that very hard to believe. It may only be temporary, but we have an opportunity to imagine what it might be like when we get through this particular period and how can draw on some of that muscle memory of bipartisanship and pragmatism for a different age.
For example, I love people starting to use the language of flattening the curve and saying ‘How might we flatten the curve on climate change?’ We now have a meme that people can wrap their heads around. They can start to recognise the change in lifestyle required to achieve a set of common goals and also the fact that we have seen some signs of progress already. Can this give us the confidence we need to apply it to other policy goals?
We are also witnessing a radical expansion of the Overton Window. The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse. The term comes from Joseph P. Overton, who stated that an idea’s political viability depends on whether it falls within this range, rather than on any politicians’ individual preferences. According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time.
What we’ve seen is the window expanding massively. If anyone had said six months ago that any government would spend $130 billion in 6 months and simultaneously be able to get the population to voluntarily physically distance themselves, I wouldn’t have believed you. And yet we’ve done it. We’ve also seen radical policy ideas, such as Universal Basic Income reconsidered, either temporarily or permanently. A reminder that the Overton window is a collective choice about what we consider acceptable. That choice is contestable and we should contest it. Our palette of options has got broader, as shown here by the UK Policy Lab.
I’ve also been reflecting on Yuval Noah Harari’s earlier work Sapiens and his thesis that human civilisation has evolved through our ability to create intersubjective fictions, or imagined realities. A fancy way of saying that we make stuff up and as long as you believe it, and I believe it, it’s real.
Nation-states don’t actually exist, but we have some conventions by which we pretend they do. Currency isn’t real, they are pieces of paper, but so long as you and I both agree that there’s some value in a bit of paper or the ones and zeros that make up our bank accounts, we can do something with that.
We tend to think these intersubjective fictions are immutable and have been around forever. The reality is many of them are only a few generations old. Some of them have shifted massively in a relatively short period of time. If you’d asked somebody thirty years ago what marriage meant, you’d get a very different answer then than you would today. The increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage in the last five to ten years in many countries around the world demonstrates how fluid these intersubjective fictions can be. It also shows that we can have a conversation about how we evolve and adapt them.
What new fictions will we need or can we create to help us get through what comes next? Do we have the imagination to bring them into being? Or is that too in crisis as Geoff Mulgan suggests? And what kind of leadership do we need to bring them into being? I suspect we will need leadership that’s humble, curious, imaginative, and experimental. Not dogmatic, but seeking out and testing ideas and bringing people with them on a journey.
And where does leadership start? Do we need capital ‘L’ leaders leading us or can we as a public provide leadership itself? Who moved the Overton Window? Was it the government? Or was it the people saying that we needed to do more, which made it easier for politicians to step into the gap created by the shift in public opinion? This is a moment when we can all show leadership about the kind of world we want to live in and help to make it a reality.
As many have stated before, this will be a marathon rather than a sprint. Feeling discombobulated is likely to be a regular feature of our lives for a while to come.
It is important that we give ourselves the permission to be discombobulated, while also daring to imagine what new better futures may emerge from this confusing time.
