The common patterns of politics and business (and possibility)
Garry Turner MCIPD
radicality.co.uk | Executive Thinking Partner | VP Business Development (freelance) | Personal & Organisational Transformation | #ChangeIsAnInsideJob
(This is a duplication of my recent medium blog)
On Friday 5th May 2023, I attended my first local election verification and count as a political candidate, and it was a brilliant, yet clarifying experience.
Brilliant to be a deeply active part of the current process as we know it.
Clarifying to see the common patterns across local politics and business that keep us in the West trapped in perceived comfort, addicted to the growth narrative and fearful of change, thereby keeping communities of humans trapped and worse many thousands of miles from our shores.
Context
I have worked in the global extractive chemical supply chain for over 20 years and just 6 months ago in my local area of West Hill, Dartford, UK we had three sleepy councillors (aka humans!), poor communication, lack of transparency, dilapidated playgrounds and general apathy, publicly at least.
I myself was getting frustrated about what I could do to try and make a small change around this, whilst also trying to wave a flag within my employer that their are systemic and human risks from perpetuating ‘business as usual’ without conscious review and re-imagination.
My own patterns and some local progress
This frustration has been building as I have continued to see and better understand my own conditioned patterns of behaviour (right to comfort, defensiveness and fear are my most common as I learned from Tema Okun’s work), how they manifest within me and how commonplace, and often oppressive, they are in the workplace and in local politics, and how they reinforce the local and global status quo which is mostly extractive and degenerative to all of life, including our own.
My thanks to my systemic guide and pattern spotting coach, Samantha Suppiah and Heather Luna respectively, in particular for holding space for the unearthing of these above insights.
Inspired by local Green Party councillor Laura Edie, I decided to run an experiment and set up the first of what would become three connected Neighbourhood Watch schemes in October 2022. Two more followed by the end of 2022.
Today, just over 6 months on in my area of West Hill, Dartford, UK we have:
All of this happened whilst I was not actively running for the local Green Party.
I have a firm belief and a knowing you see, as this has been my own work and trauma healing over the past 9 years after two years of being a repeat victim of bullying by a gang of boys as a teenager and all the dysfunction that followed it over the next 25 years.
That knowing is that when we allow ourselves to FEEL from the inside-out, no matter how painful or challenging that may be based on previous trauma or experience, then let it go, it allows a space of possibility that we just don’t REMEMBER is available to us.
We can make wildly different choices from that place and space.
It can feel like a 100X freer space.
I am making different choices from that place and space much more often. My favourite most integrated conversation on another's platform was that with disruption theorist Whitney Johnson on their Disrupt Yourself podcast a the end of 2022:
An up close and personal encounter with an oppressive and divisive system (but it was interesting and clarifying!)
On Fri 5th May, it was positive to see that after such a short period of time, that a cross-section of the West Hill community do want change, they do value having a voice, so much so that they kindly offered 374 votes to me.
However one needs to understand the misdirection, lies, co-optation and propaganda that were pushed by the incumbents to try and protect their ‘right to comfort’ patterning.
There is an incredibly toxic ‘entitlement’ energy by the big parties that assume, as one resident quoted to me on the morning of the election, “It is about time that some people realised that being in power is not a god-given right.”
Thus this result is even more pleasing as voters would need to consciously break the well known ‘block voting’ approach that takes place within our binary electoral system i.e if you have 3 councillors in your ward, you get 3 votes and you can choose to allocate ‘split votes’ to different parties, or block vote, give all your votes, to the same party.
Humans are most likely to block vote for their favourite party, regardless of whether or not that party has done any work on the ground in the local community.
A case in point is Labour in West Hill.
If you look at the 2019 results and 2023 result above, you will see that Labour, despite having zero local ACTIVE presence, nor doing any active campaigning on the run up to the election (I can assure you of both points), they still secured 1865 votes and 1812 votes in 2019 & 2023 respectively.
This is why the two major parties of Conservatives and Labour will not change to a proportional representation system, they know this colonial system by design breeds apathy, it breeds disengagement and it keeps them comfortable.
In the scheme of things, 374 votes is not bad from a standing start, that is 374 humans in West Hill that said in their mind “I’m prepared to give Garry a chance, he is trying to do things on the ground and I will consciously not block vote, even though that is the easier thing to do.”
This was a fully self-funded development, yet with support from the amazing Dartford & Gravesham Green Party team, especially Cllr Laura Edie, Julian Hood, Ciara O Hare, Marc Prior, as well as Green Party central office (in terms of my West Hill campiagn).
The shift from fear to possibility
For the first time in West Hill there was a viable alternative to Blue or Red, binary thinking was opened up.
More than that, this alternative has been proactive and driven change despite not being ‘given’ power by the local system to date.
With only 1 in 3 people voting via a mix of postal and in-person voting, the biggest opportunity I see is to ‘switch on’ the other 67% of people who didn’t vote yesterday.
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Some turnouts we’re as low as 19% yesterday, less than 1 in 5 voting, such is the level of apathy, disengagement and division by design of the current system.
How this correlate or translate into the business world?
I was really touched by the below range of feedback, all unsolicited yet positively reinforcing the fact that people do want a more community focused, active and inclusive politics.
What was particularly interesting, and appreciated, was this unexpected post by a local resident Paul Cooper:
I am involved and have similar conversations within the workplace all the time.
Humans know EXACTLY where we are at this point in our evolution, but often feel trapped.
Paralysed by the need to get by within a system that does not care about us.
We can imagine new systems and we can drive the changes ourselves, both bottom up, as well as by engaging in the formal process of elections and by using our voice and agency at work, especially those of us with less socialised barriers in the way.
This is just the start
We are already building our next four years strategy locally and we are keen to add 5–10 seats to the 200 that the Green Party of England and Wales added yesterday.
To bring this the significance of this shift to life in a different way, check out the following tweet from Chesca Walton below:
The community is primed for activation!
Finally recruitment of a new member in the count offices on Fri 5th May 2023 was fascinating !
A woman who is big into nature, biodiversity and community who was there as a guest to their Conservative candidate mum said they thought about joining the local Green Party but as they eat meat and drive a car, they felt a hypocrite!
This is a common pattern of thinking which is misguided and again a cultural pattern that has been reinforced for hundreds of years!
I work within the chemicals industry, have an electric car (where do the components come from?!) and have to fly as part of my job.
We are all doing the best we can based on our circumstances, we can and I am trying to do and be better (I rarely take the plane and take the tain much more, barely use my car locally in favour of public transport wherever possible etc) but please do not let embarrassment, assumption or fear stop you seriously considering joining the Greens.
Going Forward
It is so crystal clear to me that at every systemic lever we are in a liminal space between worlds.
A dying world of fear-based control, manipulation, accumulation and oppression and an emerging world of co-creation, emergence, connectedness and enough-ness.
This is not Pollyanna.
It is a remembering.
A letting go.
I won’t see this full shift in my life-time but it is coming and the national policies of the Green Party around proportional representation, reducing environmental impact, taxing the super-rich more heavily, UBI and more are all common sense policies that offer a chance for us to heal and reconnect, individually and collectively to ourselves, to one another and to the systems that sustain us.
I am REALLY excited about what is unfolding in the local and national party and won’t be long before residents take the unmuting / remembering of their voice and agency into their families and workplaces.
Finally
I am grateful to my best friend and wife Jackie who has been so supportive of the many hours, days and tens of thousands of steps that have been committed to this last election cycle, well beyond the last 8 weeks running up to election day.
I love you.
Shall we connect?
My name is Garry Turner and I am a Disruption and Innovation Catalyst working at the intersection of International Sales, People and Culture, Equity & Inclusion and Sustainability:
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