Over the years of running Ulex – and for years before that in our sibling project Ecodharma – we have considered it necessary and important to carve out structured times and spaces throughout the year for evaluation, reflection and taking stock. We have done that in all kinds of ways, but always we have had a period in midwinter where we pause and spend some substantial time – two weeks or so – reviewing the previous year, revisiting vision and values, attending to relationships in the team and strategising for what’s coming.
The premise being, in case you’re not familiar, that often our work (and lives in general!) can become stuck in habitual and compulsive patterns where learning is not really occurring – cycles of Action-> Experience-> Action-> Experience… – or in bigger habitual patterns of Action-> Experience-> Analysis-> Planning, that replicate approaches we already know and use the same analytical frameworks and conceptual narratives to interpret experiences. This leads to predictable conclusions and repetitive, sterile actions. The model suggests that in order to avoid this and create the opportunities for real learning and creativity, we must make space for Reflection. This means pausing, changing mode, and stopping what we’re doing for long enough that something new has a chance of coming through. It means being able to sit back from needing to know, asking questions and waiting for new information, being openly curious, receptive, and looking for opportunities to genuinely deepen awareness.
We aspire to make our annual team meetings a space that has the scope for some of this. Where we can stop, pause, reflect on the year, update one another, evaluate, ponder, discuss further, disagree, sit with discomfort, talk about dynamics, check in on our processes, nourish and build relationships and… (probably more things that happen that we aren’t consciously intending – group processes are mysterious, emergent and seem to have lives of their own!)
So what exactly were we up to this year?
Relationship and connection
As with any group space, it is always best to put the time into ‘building the container’ first. Some of the team work remotely, as far away as Nairobi, others live in community or are in romantic relationship together; some of us have known each other for decades, others less than a year! We come from different countries, cultures and class backgrounds, and we all come carrying the experiences of the year, what’s gone well, what hasn’t, what we might be finding difficult, what we want…
Knowing how much there will be to cover over these two weeks, it is really important that we take some time to lay a ground that is stable first, that brings in peoples’ ‘stuff’, let’s us know what’s present, gives us some context for connection and understanding, all that. We had this year, for example, two people in the team who had recently experienced the deaths of close loved ones and that brought a lot of grief into the space. Making sure there was time to acknowledge, hear and meet that reality – that no one felt that needed to be pushed to the side or ‘managed’ in order that work could be done – made it possible for us to do the work we needed to do in the integrated presence of those realities, without it erupting or undermining processes later.
Structurally, we did this through planning a night out at a pizza joint, some time walking in nature, and a full day-long check in where we heard about what’s going on for (11!) people, in their personal lives, in their Ulex work and in their team life. We also did a session on gratitude. It is so easy to build up resentments when working with others, and to end up in complainy or grumbly mental states around work. While it’s important that difficulties be aired and addressed (time for that later), it’s also good to find ways to cultivate minds and hearts that are attentive, appreciative, forgiving, encouraging. So that was part of the container building too, and, while these things can have an air of the contrived at the start, once we got into it there was a real flavour of warmth and appreciation in the space which the subsequent days really benefited from.
Structures and processes
We gave significant time to this too. In recent years we have shifted Ulex over to using a Sociocratic governance model. Although in lots of ways we always worked with as much power distribution, clarity around decision making areas and information transparency as possible, the shift to a fully established structure like this has taken time! And we’re still adjusting. Almost two days was given over to each of the Circles (Circles are semi-autonomous groups within the team, taking responsibility for particular domains like ‘Digital Learning and Comms’ or ‘Programming’ or ‘Grant Admin’) feeding back to the whole on what they’ve been up to, any big decisions that have been made, any issues needing input from others and so on. Then we had time to discuss how the flow amidst this structure has been working for people – where are the gaps? where are we missing one another? are we ending up with bottlenecks? how go Circle capacities to carry out their tasks? and so on. This was some thorough and detailed work, but really necessary in the process of trying to transition to being a bigger and busier organisation.
Ella has been involved in the project since it began and has seen it pass through many iterations. Talking about what we are working with now she said,
“We’re at this prefigurative edge about how we can grow and operate at scale, that keeps people in the loop, allows continued sharing of information and transparency etc and keeps the nuances, holds and honours our values, in a way that doesn’t turn us too institutional. How do we continue to grow as a substantial movement support without becoming institutionalised? So much of the meetings is about how we understand that internally, how we bring people on board or into the team, build partnerships and all that in a way that honours our integrity as having its base in the grass roots. We have a lot of experience. And we’re working it out as we go! And we don’t have loads of models of groups and organisations working at this size, with this level of reach, trying to hold this kind of solidarity based approach.”
We spent time exploring experiences and challenges of working as a remote team, with Team Culture Circle (as well as everyone else) doing some of the important and creative work of asking questions and coming up with ideas and structures for better supporting connection, care and relationship building across distance (the structures for supporting effective task management and info flows are easier to manage and have been working pretty well, though we did still give most of a day to reviewing and revisiting these processes). One of the new ideas for example, was to set up a ‘coffee slots’ channel on Slack (our IT community workspace) to help facilitate overlap between people in the team who encounter one another less. People can put themselves in for a 20 minute slot of availability and others can see who’s available and sign up for a digital/in-person tea break with a team member. We are yet to evaluate whether this works for people, but it’s good to just try stuff and keep being creative with solutions. One of Sociocracy’s core tenets is “good enough for now, safe enough to try”. This seems to be a really useful mentality to orient to with so much of team process and structure, as well as lots of other things!
“Working remotely from Nairobi has been an intriguing experience. In a physical workspace, I could easily walk over to someone else’s desk for quick clarity on something; as it is, I’m reliant on their online availability for feedback. Not having much in-person contact with the team has meant trying to build relationships mostly through a screen which is a little odd! Fortunately, I have found the sense of community at Ulex fantastic. There’s almost always someone available for a chat, and conversations are open and non-judgmental. I personally don’t feel isolated but I think it definitely takes longer to build meaningful relationships and friendships over distance. I suppose the navigating of cultural differences is made more difficult too, not being able to read body language and be in the room with someone… it can sometimes lead to more misunderstandings. In that sense, it is great to be able to come to the meetings, be with everyone a bit, and have opportunities for ironing out interpersonal challenges, face to face.”
Other Core Threads
Active Solidarity…
We spent a chunk of time looking at antioppression and active solidarity in the team and in our work. These conversations were live and present in most of the meetings, showing up as part of personal challenges and experiences in the team, in strategy and programming discussions, in resilience and resourcing discussions, in course accessibility discussions and so on. But we also needed to give some dedicated time to focus on these themes, given their importance and given some of the ongoing challenges we’ve been working with.
We are a relatively diverse team in terms of nationalities and locations, gender and sexual orientations, ages, economic backgrounds, neurologies and so on, but we are a majoritively white and able-bodied team, and our courses also tend to be able-bodied and white dominated spaces. The same has been true of facilitator teams. Over the last 5 years or so we’ve been putting concerted effort into trying to change this and make our spaces more inviting, useful and accessible to racialised folks as well as those with disabilities, and while we have made some good steps in this, it continues to be a bit of a bumpy process (which is to be expected and which we welcome as fully as we can).
We have been running more BIPOC specific courses in the last few years, our teams are definitely diversifying, and we have been innovating curriculum wise. We have been developing better processes for gathering access needs from participants and upskilling teams to support better inclusion of neurodivergent folk in training spaces, but our venues limit us, and we are trying to do something about this. There is a little more racial diversity in the team, though not as much as we’d like and that can put disproportionate weight on the black and brown team members. We also created an Active Solidarity Circle to enable us to attend to this organisational area more closely, and ensure this work doesn’t end up falling to individuals who happen to be more sensitive about it. The Circle has so far been very focused on following up arising situations related to antioppression with participants, trainers, team members – ensuring we are offering support where it’s needed, integrating the feedback and collecting the important learnings, as well as attending to the systems and processes around Active Solidarity practice in general at Ulex.
At the meetings we used Action-Learning sets to work on specific challenged people were encountering. The hope is that by attending to the finer grain of this stuff, we will be able to make wider progress in this area and more rapidly, in the ways that is possible (while honouring that lots of these kinds of changes are not quick ones and require deeper kinds of cumulative perspective and culture shifts to occur amongst committed and longstanding connection and relationship building). “What felt most important about it” said Ilaj, one of the Active Solidarity Circle members,
“was creating a space where we can support each other in the development of our solidarity skillsets and make it part of our work and daily operation, since what the systems of oppression want is to separate us and often when we fall into guilt or shame over mistakes we separate form each other, reinforcing that system. Having a space where we share challenges and support each other in seeing with new eyes, move through emotions and towards developing new skills feels revolutionary, aligned and nourishing. It also helps us to identify patterns and see the systemic nature of some of these challenges and how, apart from development of skills on an individual level, we need to grow into developing solidarity skillsets on the organisational level, creating processes and governance structures that align with that. I hope that is what we are moving more towards!”.
Reciprocity…
We run on a solidarity economy, which means, simply, ‘give what you can, take what you need’. We don’t pay each other ‘wages’ in exchange for labour, but try to offer each other the resources – financial or otherwise – that are needed for everyone’s and the organisation’s flourishing. Having been socialised in Capitalist thinking, and existing in wider Capitalist structures, it is not always easy to fulfil the values of generosity, renunciation and reciprocity at the heart of this kind of economic approach. It can feel clunky at times and not always very clear. We’ve been having ongoing conversations about reciprocity this year, touching in on these values, sharing doubts, resentments, concerns, needs, exploring project commitment and longevity (key aspects in these conversations), and talking about our longer term vision for taking care of one another as times and life stages change for us all.
“There are not always clear outcomes in conversations like these, but it is really good to chew over the material and keep the conversations fresh and alive over time so that things can keep evolving in relation to who is present in the team and what we’re responding to with work and in the wider world”- said Neus.
More on this next year most likely!
Fun…
Who doesn’t love a bit of enforced social ‘fun’ time?? Some photos probably speak more than words here, so, some images of some of the social bits – the Calçotada, evening games and some mucking around…
