I got a bit giddy yesterday. Probably because I spend my time writing these days ... thesis oblige! So Attending a conference was a huge treat. The following is an attempt to organise my thoughts... if not my feelings. 

On Thursday 13th September 2018, it was the annual conference of Lloyds Banking Group Centre for Responsible Business at Fazeley Studios, in Birmingham. 

It was wonderful to meet a few of the authors of the texts I’ve been guided by over the past few years. It seems that liberated from their parenthesis, their voices had humour, warmth and sparkle. Talking to a few people before I left, ideas of hope and courage left me with feelings of excitement about the future.  As evidence seems to suggest, it is positive emotion that helps us engage with new ideas, complexities and nuances. I feel this is important, because as I have read, if you are happy to receive new information, you are far more likely to trust it’s source, the divergent voice, and consider its significance in a reflexive way. So being invited to join a movement urging us not to be pessimists or optimists but possiblemists made sense to me - on many levels. 

Trust emerged as a golden thread. Tying together notions of accountability, transparency, purpose, co-creation and collaboration. I was struck, during Ian Thomson’s opening speech, that given their number, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals could give us a headache.  I do wrestle daily with a tendency to see things in binary, when in conversations about sustainability the perspectives are multiple, complex and intertwined. As we also heard, the tendency with multiple lists is to cherry pick, to prioritise, and present things in a linear fashion. This, I think, introduces a hierarchy, which can reduce / increase the importance of some measures. Where some interests are marginalised I worry that in an effort to gain focus we can also lose the human detail - the angry voice in a painful story.  Dissonant, smaller, or less prominent issues get lost in a complexity we try to tidy. We can lose sight of significant interactions, the very real human tragedies, that fall between procedural cracks and beyond organisational measures.

In terms of leadership, and within the forests of literature that have been printed to support its development, authors highlight the need for an ability to engage with flatter hierarchies, multiple perspectives and alternative visions. To accept another’s voice in shared story - even where it disrupts common assumptions. This demands a degree of reflexivity, because complexity and nuance are important, and a willingness to engage beyond the boundaries of our own interests, our own experience or the mindset of our disciplines. As Hargreaves warns us, our ability to sustain leadership activity depends on a full menu, not the choice of a few dishes. To be able to think of issues of diversity, inequality and social justice, for example, we need to consider lots of stuff that may lie beyond our own experience. Yet, I have noticed that what is beyond our own experience is often the easiest to reject. Our trust is challenged by the testimony of those we find less likeable, or where personal tales seem to exaggerate personal issues in isolated cases. Doing my own research, I have read that despite being well documented, disabled people’s leadership activity has not been accepted as evidence of its existence and the voice of disabled professionals and activists is often dismissed.  I don’t claim that individuals set out to silence disabled people in a shared narratives, but the fact there hasn’t been a word akin to sexism and feminism to denote similar abuse of power toward the disabled population speaks volumes!!  The irony amuses me, that when I tell people that the voice of disabled people is not trusted, I’m sometimes told that what I am saying is not true!