Communities of practice

I spoke to a group of Jewish leaders in London  last week as part of the Lead development programme, and I was struck by the depth of value they derive from being part of such a well-established community. 

I worked in Israel on a kibbutz for six months before I went to university and back then I was impressed by how this secular community had come together to live and work in a cooperative and shared way.  Speaking to the leaders I met last week I noticed how they had a similar sense of being part of a wider community that was in many ways more important than their own personal wishes.  This sense of identity can be a powerful phenomenon in motivating us as human beings to put the wider good ahead of our own personal desires. I appreciate that there are political issues with this sense of community, and that there can be is a divisive nature to this sense of tribalism that leads to mistrust and sometimes to conflict.  As leaders we want to achieve a sense of community among our colleagues without it becoming a source of division (and conflict) with other communities.  It’s a fine and difficult balance to achieve.  

Mr Holmes and the vulnerability of age

Watching Sir Iain McKellen play the ageing Holmes in the film of the same name, I was struck by the vulnerability age can bring, and how it is similar in some respects to the vulnerability of youth.  

In the film Holmes befriends Roger, the young son of his housekeeper, as they look after the bees together.  Holmes is losing his memory, which is deeply frustrating for someone famed for his ability to connect facts and make logical deductions from scant details.  Roger does not remember his father, who was killed in the first world war, so their shared loss gives them a fresh connection.  Roger is bright and insightful, and he helps Holmes to make sense of the final case he worked on thirty years previously, piecing together the facts and gradually solving the puzzle.  

Context, culture and faith in human nature

A glance at history tells us that humankind can be both noble and cruel.

My wife was in Kraków in Poland last week and she visited Auschwitz while she was there. It is now a museum of cruelty, a monument to our ability as human beings to organise and inflict incredible brutality on each other simply because of who our parents are. And at the same time we read about incredible acts of bravery like in Schindler's List.

I may be getting old, but I am beginning to lose my unfailing belief in the basic integrity of human nature. I have always believed that most people come to work with a desire to do a good job, that the basic human position is one of honesty and good intent.  I am less sure of this as I look around the world and in recent history see continued acts of aggression, cruelty and selfish exploration of other people.  In Bosnia and Rwanda, in Somalia and Nigeria, in the towns and cities of Britain, we have seen and heard stories of people inflicting cruelty on other people on an organised and persistent scale. I am drawn to the conclusion that context is everything and that we are influenced by those around us, by our parents, our peers, our religion, our ancestry and our political context more than we might like to think.

For us to break free of these influences requires courage and persistence. But before that is possible we need to have seen a glimmer of an alternative, a possible world of tolerance, respect and peacefulness. I suspect for many young people in our society this glimmer is hardly visible. The option to believe in a different approach, to question religious and cultural context, to challenge the 'truths' our parents and older role models fed us when we were young, is not always that accessible to young people.  If that's true in highly controlled societies such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and parts of the USA, it's almost certainly true in parts of the UK, where religious and social conditioning are pervasive.

We need to enable our young people to make up their own minds and where appropriate to choose a route which is not necessarily that suggested by their context.  This requires less conditioning of our young people and a more liberal and balanced approach to education. It needs less polemic and more inquiry. We can start by insisting on a balanced education for our young people, full of exploration, discussion and the encouragement of independent thinking.

We need to focus more and more on the principles of what we value in the UK such as respect for others, hard work, tolerance and freedom of expression. As many parts of the world seem to be moving towards bigotry and intolerance of alternative views, we need to be making a stand for the opposite. We can appeal to the positive tendencies in our human nature, offering a route through life that is characterised by harmony, truth and peace. 

A Possible Life: a book about people in search of connection

‘A Possible Life’ by Sebastian Faulks is a book about soldiers and partners, parents and children, scientists and musicians, all risking body and soul in search of connection – some key to understanding what makes us the people we become.

This series of short stories leaves you caught between the loneliness life can be and the moments of joy that define the space between. The stories focus on turning points in people’s lives, moments when things change fundamentally for the people involved. It describes how connected we are, how we might live our lives in other people’s, how decisions we make cause others to experience different lives. How we are all connected and yet single, separate and not really of any importance. How we are part of humanity, like fish in a shoal.

Faulks describes the particular lives of particular people with ease and an eye for the details that tell the story. We are seeing our lives in their experience. The sadness with which the singer leaves the stage, or the wounded officer dreams of facing the bowler at the crease, helps us feel the connection with their lives as they live out the consequences of their actions. Somehow we recognise the shame of the father in a Victorian workhouse as he fails to acknowledge his son across the courtyard. We are humanity. We die. We are connected.