So, You Want Disruptive Change
(In 2014 I was asked to give a TED X talk in Sacramento California. I have never been a fan of TED, and was hesitant to say the least. But nonetheless, after much wrangling, I agreed to bring something that “challenged the TED audience.” I had four weeks to prepare and deliver a talk, and the following is the talk that was rejected. The talk I gave will be linked to at the end of this piece).
TED X Sacramento 2014 — Draft
Beginning in the early 1990’s and extending well into the 2000’s I worked with hardcore young men and women. Many of them were gangsters — bloods, crips, 13th street, 18th street, — white power kids, African-American kids, Latino and Native kids.
Those were heady, incredible times, and since then I have worked with leaders and innovators all over the world and few have matched the intelligence and honesty these kids possessed.
When I am at venues like these I am always drawn back to those times. They compel me to wonder what I could say that would be real to the young men and women I worked with back in those days.
If this were a room full of gangsters, what would I say?
So I thought you all could help me in a little experiment. Imagine you are the kind of kid that when adults see you they get a moment of panic in their bones. The kind of kid that when folks see you in the elevator, they wait for the next one.
Then imagine me talking to you about some progressive ways to cultivate happiness in the workplace, or explaining to you where ideas come from, or some cutting edge leadership neuro-science discovery. Maybe I talk to you about the 8 steps toward emotional mastery or 3 Laws of performance — or God-forbid, I wrap my talk around my latest philanthropic efforts in the bush of Africa with my clever malaria prevention machine made of duck tape, scrap metal and recycled tin cans.
Within seconds, your hood would be pulled over your eyes and if it were my kids, the Tupac, E-40 or Too Short in your headphones would be the only thing you heard for the rest of the night.
I want to ask you to stay in this experiment for a bit. And let me tell you why. Just about all of you in this room — while you may have your critiques of society — are a part of this society. Society has let you in. You have a good education, a good job, run your company. You may feel at times uneasy about the culture around you, but nonetheless you are an active participant. I mean, you are at TED –and TED is all about celebrating successful participation — folks that matter.
My kids and millions like them don’t matter and they never will. They are not going to college; they are not going to get that good job. Its not gonna happen despite all the American Dream, pull yourself up by the bootstraps nonsense.
They are exiled from the dominant culture and they know it. This gives them a unique and powerful vantage point to see what is going on and to see it plain as day.
It is this vantage point that we want.
One must be estranged to see clearly — one must be outside something to get to the bottom of it. And our job is to get to the bottom of what is going on all around us so that we can activate change that means something.
To get to something beyond what I like to call the change without the change.
This being the outsider — the person that is excluded — is a crucial element of what I am going to lay out as a geometry for real change. It is the framework that allows us to accomplish what Aristotle deemed the criteria for courage as a leader: facing up to reality.
In facing up to reality we avoid emotional outbursts on the one side and consoling illusions on the other. In other words we avoid the stalemate that most progressive audiences like TED fall into. Half of you are filled to the brim with an unceasing optimism and excitement for the future. Ahh, now is the moment of incredible opportunity. The other half are certain we are careening down the abyss of planetary and social devastation with no turning back.
One side consoling illusion the other emotional outburst.
I am going to make the claim that this courageous act of facing up to reality is only possible as the outsider looking in. It requires a condition of estrangement from the dominant culture. This is why I am asking you to embody the spirit of my kids.
The way this works for my kids — and it works for you all — is through ritual. Ritual is how we get to clarity and power. It allows us to deconstruct our notions and ourselves so that we can be reconstructed and brought back up into a more whole person.
Thousands of years ago in Egypt there was a ritual for the men and women being trained to take on leadership roles in the society designed to show them how their minds worked. My team was introduced to this ritual 15 years ago in Chicago by a group of intense men of African descent that also worked with young people like us. It extends over a period of days, and it is designed to break down all the certainties and givens guiding how you see the world.
It is designed to show you what is power and what is the illusion of power.
Lets start with the basics — this notion of change, or what I am calling the “the change without the change.” This is a huge business. Talk to any seasoned and smart kid in the system and they will lay out, with eerie accuracy, how much money they generate; for the case workers, probation officers, prison wardens, group homes and dozens more of the “stakeholders” in their world. Their bodies are built into the economics of the system. If they leave the system, or if they leave and are not replaced, the business model collapses. People lose their jobs, non-profits shut down, group-homes, prisons and state hospitals go empty.
Look at the public school system from the eyes of the exiled outsider. Countless efforts for changing it are everywhere — with huge money at stake. All ignore the simple, yet confronting truth that public schools — as a design — were not created to awaken the intelligence of the young. Instead, our public school system was designed to create mediocrity, to subdue the inner life, devalue the body and ensure a sure supply of easily manageable workers.
This is not hyperbole. Look at it — go the origin. Look at your children stuffed into a perfect box for 8 hours a day sitting inside on a chair with thousands of other kids. Preparing them expertly to spend their adult life stuffed into a larger box for 8 hours a day with thousands of other responsible adults.
Examine our heroes on the cover of INC or Time magazine. Super rich folks turned to changing the world. Making billions on the one side selling cheap burgers or devices, paying low wages, extracting labor and precious resources from Africa and China — then turning around and saving the needy and downtrodden around the world. The first round of American titans did it too, and we worshipped them just the same.
What we are talking about here is the plantation. Plantation economics. There are masters, slaves that work in the field and slaves that work out of the harsh heat and in the big house. America was built upon plantation economics and this design continues to this day. Here and everywhere.
Today, the plantation is as much a state of mind as it is an institutional reality. It finds its expression in everything we have looked at so far. We worship the masters and bring aid and charity to the slaves working in the fields under the fierce sun.
Now within this frame look at the change industry. Who makes the big money? Who makes the big decisions? Who defines the narrative, say, for saving the environment? For transforming young people?
What are the rules of this game? What can I say? What surely is forbidden?
So that was just a lot. I know. My kids could absorb it, and I know you can too. We need to spend serious time engaging the illusion of power. For my kids, their lives and futures depended upon it. For us, gathered here to bring authentic change into the world, ours lives depend upon it too.
But because I don’t have 5 days with you, I have to move quickly now to the reconstruction part of the ritual. We have to begin to build up a proper understanding of power free of the illusion. And the best way I know how is through story. And my favorite starting point is with the story of Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita.
Arjuna — the hero of the Bhagavad-Gita — a most beloved and revered part of the epic Mahabharata, was a badass warrior. One of the best. Right away in the story we find Arjuna in full array surveying the battlefield. All are readying for war — and in this climatic moment Arjuna is paralyzed and overcome. All of sudden, at the moment that should be his glory, nothing makes sense to him. He collapses in a pile of shame and despair. He has no desire for victory or acclaim. He is silent.
This is an incredible paradox. Arjuna is our hero, yet he surely does not look like any hero we are trained to recognize. If Arjuna were running your organization, you would fire him. And yet, he is our hero.
Why? Because he shows us the way to power out of the illusion of power. He shows us that experiences like collapse, confusion, disorientation and silence are central elements on any journey into a proper understanding of power. And we know this, with absolute certainty, because in the next multitude of verses comprising the story that follow his epic collapse Arjuna shows us how to learn. How to see the world for the way that it truly is versus the way we have been taught to see.
Arjuna achieves his liberation along the only authentic path. And every wisdom tradition knows this wisdom. What the Greeks called Katabasis, or the descent: The journey into the underworld, into the swamp, into the abyss, into exodus, the belly of the whale.
Suddenly you are thrown into exile. And if you survive it, something deep inside you changes. You are free. You know power and the illusion of power. A brand new field of possibility is now yours.
Let me share with you one more story that brings us full circle. It is the story of Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey. This is a story that shows us what it is to leave home and then return much later bearing the wisdom of the adventure into life.
After years of brutal war, Odysseus begins his journey home. It is a journey that takes him ten years. Along the way he loses all his men and is finally delivered home in secret within the dark of night. He arrives disguised in such a way that none but a housekeeper recognizes him.
There is a journey and a return. And when I return, I am invisible to everything and everyone that was once familiar to me.
We deconstruct the givens in our mind, then we reconstruct ourselves upon more sure ground, then we return home. We begin in exile, we live there as long as we need to, and then we return to bring our wisdom home. This is the perfect cycle of change. This is a cycle every great leader has known for thousands of years. It is a cycle honored again and again in all of our wisdom traditions.
I am telling the story of a kind of sacred geometry that is missing from our leadership conversations these days. And we pay a deep cost for this omission.
Wisdom always lives on the margins — of our own minds, traditions and social norms. It will not show up for us in ways familiar, and it will demand of us new practices and skills. I am talking about a level of freedom within the body, the mind and the emotions that is uncommon and precious.
I want to leave with you perhaps my favorite lines of poetry. In my early twenties I traveled all through Central and South America studying, living and exploring with radicals and revolutionaries. Real deal people. Otto Rene Castillo was a revolutionary born in 1934 in Xela, Guatemala and was a remarkable poet who lived and was murdered within a period of unthinkable violence and mayhem. These lines haunt me and inspire me.
Only in ourselves.
The light, the dawn
or nowhere.
— Repeat —
Castillo here reminds us of the work. We must bring the whole world in — without exception, without preference — and make it our own.
Fail and you become lost.
For myself, and in honor of my kids, I urge you all to seek out the margins — of your minds, your beliefs about the world — in service to the cultivation of that rare species of imagination that creates a better reality.
A quality of imagination that gives life to both the light and the dawn.
Thank you.
(And here is the talk I actually gave):
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Andrew Markell is the Co-Founder of Exile, a company that creates, advises and helps capitalize transformative companies and market ecosystems dedicated to empowering people + planet.
