HABIT 1 ACTING RESPONSIBLY

A system produces the results it is producing because the people who are part of it continue to play the roles they are playing. Radical engagement starts with acknowledging where we are: accepting and taking responsibility for the roles we are playing and for those we need to play—not just doing what is expected of us or whatever we like. We become part of the solution by becoming aware of how we are part of the problem, and acting accordingly.

CARING FOR ALL OUR RELATIONS

Marcia Anderson is a medical doctor and the vice-dean for Indigenous health, social justice, and anti-racism in the Faculty of Health Sciences of the University of Manitoba. Her professional biography, before it lists her academic and public health accomplishments, says that she “is Cree-Anishinaabe and grew up in the North End of Winnipeg, with family roots in the Norway House Cree Nation and Peguis First Nation in Manitoba.” She is conscious of the people and places she comes from and is part of, and this consciousness provides a basis for her work to transform the health system in Manitoba.

I interviewed Anderson about her work on dismantling systemic racism in health and health education—on transforming rather than just tweaking this system. She explained that racism is manifested in the system’s visible policies, procedures, and practices, which are driven by its invisible underlying culture, beliefs, and paradigms—and that changing the latter involves people who are part of the system transforming themselves and their relationships with one another.

When I asked her why she had chosen to do this challenging work, she answered by telling me a startling story about her father having had a heart attack while she was a medical resident.

My dad had a massive heart attack when he was forty-nine. It was terrible: he actually drove himself to the emergency room and had a cardiac arrest at the triage desk. I was at home after a Critical Care Unit rotation, so at that time I was living and breathing heart attacks. My mom called me and just said that he had collapsed, and so I went in to the hospital not knowing anything else. He was in the resuscitation room and was not being appropriately treated. The reason why, even though he was in obvious, clear, severe shock, was that they assumed he was drunk; they said that right to my face, not knowing that he was my father. So I had to intervene, and I took over my dad’s care, ordered the sedation, ordered the tests, had someone call the angiographer, all of that. Very clearly he would have died if I wasn’t a doctor and hadn’t been on that rotation. He did end up making it, after a long and complicated hospitalization.

That moment crystallized my purpose. There’s tons of data about racism in the health care system, but for me, at the end of the day, it’s: The next time my dad has a heart attack, is he going to be safer if I’m not with him? Then, in a kind of “all my relations” view, my dad is relatively privileged in having a daughter who’s a well-known physician, and that will afford him some safety if he or I can identify our relationship, but that shouldn’t be necessary for Indigenous people or Black people or other Brown people to achieve equitable health care.

I was moved by the connection Anderson made between her concern for her father and for others. And I noticed that in telling this story she referred to an “all my relations” view, and I asked her what this meant.

This core teaching, in multiple First Nations languages, is to see everyone as family. It’s the difference between seeing the whole community as your relatives versus only your nuclear family. It is one of the reasons why you experience vicarious trauma when you see something happen to someone you identify with: you yourself are traumatized when there’s a police shooting involving an Indigenous person, or a report on Indian Residential Schools comes out. There are pluses and hardships that come with this extended view of kin.

So my integrity wouldn’t be just to make sure my dad is safer. I’d already done this by virtue of the work and who I am and my recognizability, but I couldn’t sleep at night if I didn’t extend this more broadly in my extended kinship networks. And a core part of the teaching is this doesn’t just refer to human relatives: it refers to the earth, the water, and the other beings as well.

Anderson’s understanding of what she needs to do—of her role and responsibility—in the Manitoba health system is informed by her understanding of her relatedness within larger human and more-than-human systems.

SEEING MY ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITY

I first met Anderson in 2018 when we, along with some of her First Nations colleagues and mine at Reos, organized a process in which fifty Indigenous leaders created a vision and pathway for transforming the First Nations health system in Manitoba to produce better and fairer outcomes. (The life expectancy of First Nations people in the province is ten years less than that of other Manitobans.)1 This process enabled me to see more clearly the terrible results that the Canadian system is producing for Indigenous people, and challenged me to act responsibly given my privileged role in that system.

The first morning of the first workshop of the process immediately revealed a crack in this system, which was represented in microcosm by those of us who were in the room. I was presenting the methodology that our joint facilitation team was proposing, backing it up with examples from my international experience, when George Muswaggon, a former grand chief from Cross Lake First Nation, spoke up in a matter-of-fact voice: “I don’t trust you.”

I was frightened by this challenge to my presentation—to this cracking of my expertise, which I had assumed was solid. But through this crack I could immediately see why Muswaggon and others in the group didn’t trust me and didn’t want to go along with the proposal I was making. For centuries in Canada (as elsewhere), Indigenous people have been colonized, massacred, oppressed, marginalized, and cheated by White people, who arrogantly force things to be the way they want them to be. Some of the participants in this workshop thought that I was reproducing this degenerative approach and weren’t prepared to accept it. I recognized the roles I was playing in this system—both as an impartial facilitator and as a White expert—and this recognition enabled me to relax and open myself up to changing what I was doing.

A little while later we took a break in the meeting, and while the participants went next door to have coffee, our facilitation team huddled around a table in the meeting room. We were all upset that the participants had rejected our expert proposal. But within fifteen minutes, we had decided to pivot sharply. When the meeting resumed, we took a completely different approach that braided Reos’s global methodology with that of the local First Nations: starting and ending every day in a traditional spiritual ceremony led by Muswaggon and others; employing fewer, shorter structured activities to create more space for unstructured dialogue; and having more of the facilitation conducted by the First Nations members of our team and less by Reos, with me coaching from the sidelines rather than directing from the front.

Anderson emphasized the need for us to take this new approach that decentered Reos’s methodology by quoting Black civil rights activist Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”2 Our team accepted responsibility for the roles we had been playing in the project and the tools we had been using; we changed them, and from then on the project progressed more fluidly and productively, and helped the First Nations health system in Manitoba work better during COVID-19 and afterward. Out of this crack a new way forward grew.

Later I spoke with Muswaggon about our interaction. He told me, “The history of my people means that we cannot dole out trust like candy. But I observed you and prayed and decided that you are a good person. This trust is simple and will last.” Our strengthened relationship enabled us to advance the project.

We cannot act responsibly to transform a system unless we understand and acknowledge our roles in that system. My experience in Manitoba of seeing more clearly the roles I was playing nudged me to act more humbly and responsibly in this and other contexts.

During the ceremonial portions of the Manitoba workshops, I heard the elders use an evocative phrase, “All my relations,” so I was intrigued when Anderson used it in our later conversation about her work. Then I read the following sentence in an essay by Cherokee writer Thomas King: “ ‘All my relations’ is an encouragement for us to accept the responsibilities we have within the universal family by living our lives in a harmonious and moral manner (a common admonishment is to say of someone that they act as if they had no relations).”3

King’s parenthetical comment hit me. I grew up as a bookish kid in a nuclear family in an individualistic culture. Moving from London to Cape Town in 1993 was therefore a stretch for me: from living on my own without knowing my neighbors to living in a bustling house with my new wife, Dorothy, and her four teenage children in a community where people took a keen interest in their neighbors’ lives. Moreover, coming from the United Kingdom to South Africa, working as an expert international consultant, and becoming a White stepfather to Black kids brought into relief my embodiment of the deep hierarchical structures of colonialism, White supremacy, and paternalism. I had to unlearn a lot before I could even begin to adopt a horizontal, all-my-relations view.

I was accustomed to thinking of myself simply as an impartial outsider who helped other people transform their systems. Radical engagement, however, requires us to stretch beyond this comfortable, arm’s-length position to grasp the ways in which we are part of these systems—and therefore play a role in them and have a responsibility toward them.

WHAT IT MEANS TO ACT RESPONSIBLY

The first everyday habit for transforming systems generatively is acting with responsibility, not only for ourselves but also for the larger system. What does this mean?

It doesn’t mean doing whatever we want or like to do.

It doesn’t mean adapting to the system: keeping our head down and staying in line, doing what the system expects of us so that we can thrive within it.

It doesn’t mean throwing up our hands, complaining that there is nothing we can do to change things.

It doesn’t mean pushing the system to become the way we want it to be, regardless of what others want—that’s dictatorial and degenerative.

And it doesn’t mean taking responsibility for everything that is going on in the system, like a savior—that’s unrealistic and degenerative.

It does mean that, like elephants caring for other members of their herd, we must accept responsibility for our particular relatedness to the system, the role we play in it, and our impact.

What is our particular role?

DISCERNING OUR ROLE

We discern the role we can and must play in transforming the system by becoming conscious of where we have come from and with whom we are related—as Anderson’s biography emphasized— and, consequently, of where we are now.

The foundational everyday habit of radical engagement is to pay attention to the position in the system that we are currently occupying: the role we are currently playing.

What is our position in the system, and to whom are we connected and related? From this position, what can we see and do? Every particular position—geographic and functional, at the center or the periphery, senior or junior—enables a particular contribution to understanding what is happening in the system and to transforming it. For example, when I spoke with Trevor Manuel about the South African transition, our different histories and positions in that system—his as a South African politician, mine as a Canadian facilitator—generated our different understandings and contributions. Just because you’re not in control of a system that you are part of (individuals rarely are) doesn’t mean that there is no way for you to influence that system; it only means that you have to discern your role and the contribution you can make.

Given our position, what role are we playing in what is happening in the system? Management professor Bill Torbert pointed out to me that the aphorism, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” misses an important point, which is that if you’re not part of the problem, you can’t be part of the solution. If we can’t see how what we are doing or not doing is contributing to things being the way they are, then our only means of transforming the system is through pushing on it from the outside—and when we do this, our contribution is likely to be either negligible or dictatorial.

The responsible starting point for contributing to systems transformation is to understand the role we are currently playing, the responsibility this role entails, and therefore the role we can and must play going forward. Educator Vanessa Andreotti says, “Our first responsibility is to expand our collective capacity to sit with difficult and painful things, without feeling overwhelmed, immobilized, without placing our hope in quick fixes, and without relations falling apart.”4 Accepting responsibility takes courage and patience.

Businessman Tex Gunning puts such sitting with difficult things at the center of his radical approach to management development.5 I worked with him when he was the president of Unilever Bestfoods Asia and we were organizing a business–government–civil society alliance to reduce child malnutrition in India. He pushed hard to get his executives out of their privileged, comfortable cocoons to confront the reality of what was going on in their company and society; when I met him, he was sending them to spend two weeks doing frontline community service jobs, such as working as orderlies in hospitals. “It takes wiping shit off people’s bums,” he told me, “to shake these businesspeople out of their sense of separateness and superiority, so that they take their human responsibilities seriously.” Acting responsibly requires humility and openness.

CHOOSING TO ACT RESPONSIBLY

The crucial choices involved in acting responsibly relate to what particular relationships and roles we are acknowledging and accepting responsibility for—both the roles we have been given and those we have taken. In my case, is it my roles as an individual, responsible for myself; as a brother, husband, father, uncle, and grandfather, responsible to my immediate family; as a founder of Reos, responsible to my colleagues and clients; as a writer, responsible to my publisher and readers; as a neighbor, citizen, consumer, investor; as a Montrealer, Canadian, descendent of European immigrants, Jew; as a being entangled with all life? Each of these roles carries with it different opportunities and obligations. “Acting responsibly” is less a recipe than a riddle.

There is no simple correct choice about what relationships and roles we accept responsibility for and to whom we are responsible. As I’ve said elsewhere, most people don’t think they need to transform the systems they are part of (or don’t think they’re able to), so they accept responsibility only for protecting and advancing themselves and their family or organization, and for living as well as they can within the systems as they currently are.

But many people, including Anderson and others on whose work this book is based, think they can and must contribute to transforming systems, and so accept larger responsibilities. Most of you who are reading this book are also accepting larger responsibilities, and because a system is transformed through the actions of many people in many different positions in the system, with and without formal authority, doing many different things, every one of you, by engaging with those around you and working the cracks within your reach, can contribute to transformation.

Whatever the location and scale of the responsibility we are accepting, doing so means assuming liability and accountability— not making excuses—for our contribution to what is happening. We must take actions based not only on what we need but also on what is needed of us. This takes guts, especially when it implies sacrificing our comfortable or privileged way of seeing ourselves and doing things—which is why we so often deny or abdicate our responsibility. Writer Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”6 Acting responsibly is a moral and ethical undertaking.

THE TWO FACES OF ACTING RESPONSIBLY

To be able to contribute to transforming a system, we must act responsibly—but usually this is not easy or straightforward.

Here is an exercise that I have found to be illuminating: Write two one-page essays about a problematic situation you’re dealing with. In the first essay, describe the situation as if you were observing or directing it from the outside; write down in detail what other people are doing that is contributing to the situation being as it is and what those people need to do differently to enable the situation to get unstuck and move forward.

In the second essay, describe this same situation as if you were participating in and cocreating it from the inside; write down in detail what you are doing that is contributing to the situation being as it is and what you need to do differently to enable the situation to get unstuck and move forward.

After you have written these essays, observe the difference in yourself in shifting from the first, outside stance to the second, inside one. People who do this exercise typically observe that in the second essay, when they are taking responsibility for their role in what is happening, they feel more guilty and burdened, and also see that they have more options for what actions they can take and more energy to act.

Taking responsibility for our role creates both more liability and more agency. It nudges us beyond simplistic stories about who is good and bad, right and wrong—beyond heroes and villains.

As most of us know from our family lives, acting as though others are our relations toward whom we have responsibilities produces both joy and suffering—as Anderson described it, “pluses and hardships.” In her book Becoming Kin, Ojibwe-Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawek observes, “We are all related, but clearly we don’t always get along.”’7 Acting responsibly involves reducing our separateness and cracking our protective shells, which open us up to both healing and hurt. Acting responsibly, as relations, is life-giving and necessary, but not easy or straightforward.

Acting responsibly involves acting to exert an influence on the larger system beyond the domain over which we have ownership or control. Such stretching can be uncomfortable and even dangerous, and it also enables us to make a bigger difference in the world.

In summary, acting responsibly presents us with both risks and opportunities.

The first and foundational everyday habit of radical engagement, acting responsibly, involves stretching toward answers to—wrestling with—the questions, What are, today, our relationships, roles, and responsibilities in this system? Given these, what can and must we do next? With this habit as with the other six, we need to strive for progress rather than perfection.