1. Start here: Steps To A Humanity Of Organisation
Humanity AND effectiveness: a new idea, a life's work - or both?
Welcome. I’m Mark McKergow, and this is my new platform for practical and provocative ideas on how we can organise, lead, manage, learn and live better, both more humanely AND more effectively.
Both these aspects are very important to me. Over thirty years of being an author, consultant, trainer, coach, facilitator and speaker I’ve focused on various fields including Solutions Focus, Host Leadership, accelerated learning and community building (Sunday Assembly and Village In The City). I’ve become clearer recently that these various different things have a core - something that ties them all together and is really at the heart of what I want to do and say.
Part of it is that these are all things which:
Make ‘hard’ things easier, quicker, cheaper and more rewarding
Use abilities and know-how that people already have (and perhaps have not noticed yet)
Take a counter-intuitive or unexpected turn, and
Work ‘with’ the natural grain of the world rather than against it.
It’s also that at their heart, all my work is about combining treating people humanely AND that leading to a more, not less, effective way of working. It’s easy to be nice to people in a woolly, ineffective, fumbling way. It’s depressingly common (though perhaps less common than 30 years back) to find people who think that effectiveness must, at some stage, equal brutality.
This ‘brutality’ can come in a variety of ways, not all of them physical or even noticeable by others. Some use power over people to force them. Some use threats and coercion. Some ‘gaslight’ others to make them distrust their own minds. French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas even said that to change people’s language is an act of violence.
However, these writings will mostly not be about brutality but how to work in other ways while making effective and efficient progress both in our own lives and in the lives of those around us - at work, in our community, in our families.
Accelerated Learning
My early work in the 1990s was focused around applying what were known in those days as ‘accelerated learning’ methods to corporate training. I ran hundreds of workshops to help business trainers redesign their sessions along ‘whole-brain, whole-body’ lines which made for more activity, more memory, more efficient use of time AND more fun. One quite dramatic outcome was when I helped a nuclear power company redesign a long technical course to be both shorter, have better pass-rates, have fewer drop-outs AND have the participants looking forward to their next training course rather than dreading it. You can read about that project here.
This kind of work was exactly on point for me. Everyone knew that training had to be boring, hard work, long, energy-sapping and sorted the sheep from the goats by hard challenges. What if it could be enjoyable, lively, stimulating, encouraging AND shorter for the same outcomes? Everyone wins - the learners enjoy it, the trainers have a better time delivering it, and (pretty much) everyone passes. The only downside is for those who view failure (by some) as a sign of success rather than abandonment.
Solutions Focus
At the same time as working with trainers, I stumbled across the field of Brief Therapy. This tradition offers the idea that people with various ‘psychological’ problems can be helped quickly and effectively not by seeking to cure them but by helping them (re)discover more satisfactory ways of living. When I found this school of thought in 1993, Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) was in the ascendance. I learned it and then set about setting it in an organisational setting, where it looks very like coaching. The Solutions Focus book came out of this (with Paul Z Jackson, 2002, revised second edition 2007). Further books followed created along with my partner (now wife) Jenny Clarke.
SF is a marvellous practice, where practitioners help to identify what a better future might look like, what’s working already for them in that direction, and encouraging a focus on tiny details and small steps. The idea is that shorter is better (as long as it’s effective), a direct challenge to the prevailing psychoanalytic wisdom that good treatment is long and anything short-term is inadequate. And, most people experience SF as positive, encouraging, strength-based and other useful things. So it’s a great fit in our quest for a humanity of organising, whether as coaching, management, team development, organisational develop or even leadership. After 50+ international events. the SOLWorld community continues to explore this today (2023 conference details here) and the InterAction journal is a great free source of papers, cases, interviews and other materials.
Host Leadership
In 2003 I was inspired by an old Arabic proverb relayed by my dear friend Matthias Varga von Kibed:
“The host is both the first and the last.”
Leading as a host… being both the first (active, stepping forward) AND the last (reflective/observing, stepping back) could be a way of leading? I started to unpack this idea, and there is so much in it! One headline is that hosts act by invitation where they can (soft power) and welcome and engage with people, even those they ‘ought to’ despise. Nelson Mandela turns out to have been a great host leader! The act of host leadership can be seen as combining (and superseding) both heroic leadership (needing to be at the front all the time) and servant leadership (insisting on being in the background).
More than a decade of talking to people, interviewing good leaders who acted as hosts and great hosts who seemed to be leading, the book Host: Six new rules roles of engagement for team, organisations, communities and movements was published in 2014 (with Helen Bailey, Solutions Books), followed by several conferences and the Host Leadership Fieldbook in 2019 (with Pierluigi Pugliese. Solutions Books).
Sunday Assembly/Village In The City
We lived in some lovely places in Bristol, Cheltenham and London, and I started to feel that something was missing - being part of a community. My wife Jenny was a humanist funeral celebrant and the celebrations she created and led - funerals without God, if you like - were always well appreciated. We idly used to speculate that some kind of regular get-together would be better than waiting for someone to die.
Then in late 2012 we saw adverts for the first ‘Sunday Assembly’ - a kind of church without god, a secular congregation founded by two comedians, Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans with the motto Live Better, Help Often and Wonder More. We went to the first one and it was wonderful! So I threw my shoulder to the Sunday Assembly wheel and acted as the first network co-ordinator as assemblies sprang up all over the world. We moved to Edinburgh and I am now Chair of Sunday Assembly Edinburgh, as well a playing in the live band we have to accompany our songs (think The Beatles, Queen and Katy Perry).
When the pandemic came along in 2020 it occurred to me that the future was going to be much more local than we had expected. My area of Edinburgh, the West End, had next to nothing for local residents to engage with (it was seen more as a working and shopping location albeit a very nice one). So I set to combining Solutions Focus, Host Leadership and what I’d learned from Sunday Assembly to help create a neighbourhood community here, and also to encourage folk to do something similar in their own neighbourhoods around the world. Village In The City has engaged people from four continents, we have a manifesto, a handbook and lots of resources including a podcast.
About this Substack
I have been writing about all these topics for ages, but in a rather segregated and pigeonholed way; SF, Host Leadership, Village In The City all in their own places. Now with a new year starting I am going to explore not just these topics but the overlaps, the commonalities, the interesting connections, the areas inbetween and questions yet to be answered or even asked, all about how to be both humane AND effective. And it will all happen here, on Substack.
This platform is easy to subscribe to and engage with, it’s free and I hope it will offer a place where we can explore together. So if you have a topic or question you think would be interesting, get in touch here or email me at mark@sfwork.com.
A footnote - about Wittgenstein
I have been an enthusiastic follower of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy about language use and the ‘social mind’ for at least two decades. I was lucky enough to be a Visiting Research Fellow at the Philosophy Department of the University of Hertfordshire for several years with Dan Hutto and Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, which helped me hone my recent thinking on enactive cognition and the Next Generation Of Solution Focused Practice (Routledge, 2021).
Here’s the thing. Because Wittgenstein was very aware that this world is a highly contextual place where very little is always the case (particularly in the way of people. interaction and behaviour), he was very reluctant to state his conclusions outright. He prefers to point to them by giving examples, and leave it up to the reader to work it out (because a bald statement of ‘this is how it is’ would not always be correct. I was perhaps over-impressed by this strategy - I too love to help people work things out for themselves. However, my experience is that for everyone who does work it out, there are maybe dozens who don’t.
So, in this writing I am going to try to be more clear about the conclusions. Even if they aren’t always the case, they will be worth thinking about and using as the next steps on the ladder of making progress and going on together. Join me! Subscribe now.
Hi Annika, that sounds very interesting. Any links please?
Thanks for an inspiring start!
Im called to this platform mainly because of the headline which raises hopes about the possibility of humanity and effectiveness.
Because I myself find that I am trying to create a whole from the parts that I have worked with over the years and that all (in the form of methods, tools, theories) are so well connected. And when I use the parts as a whole, they also become more genuinely rooted in me, in my life and probably also more effective and useful and comprehensible to others.
(But perhaps also a little bit ”stronger”, definitive and uncompromising? Meaning to much change?- to much humanity, to much effectiveness? 😊)
Together with a publisher here in Sweden, I have created an E-course called
Sustainable managers and businesses through trust-based leadership in practice.
I see it as the course creating a whole under the heading of trust and has in it primarily aimed to spread knowledge about trust-based leadership in practice (know how). The course contains various parts: Solution focus approach, empathy, psychological and social safety, roles and positions, facilitation and participation on an individual, group and organizational level.
(Here In Sweden, Trust-based governance and leadership has become a governance model that is talked about a lot and that is in demand in the public sector, but which, in my opinion, has not yet really had an impact in practice. In addition the center of gravity has definitely shifted rapidly now in connection with political changes, so there is some confusion at the moment)
Again, thanks Marc for an inspiring start! 🙏
I'm curious about; What now?