12 years ago, today we launched 6heads, an innovation and sustainability forum. 6 years ago today we launched She Leads Change a leadership and sustainability change programme.
Both organisations inspired dedicated communities to learn together towards systemic change. Both aimed to model new ways of being and doing and be beautiful experiments towards a more sustainable world.
Both have been successful in stimulating meaningful change. The most important thing each has done is to create, inspire, empower and connect networks of people working with change to bring fresh perspectives and tools to challenges and to support one another to activate transformational change.
As I reflect on both these organisations there are lessons that stand-out that may help other sustainability practitioners / system entrepreneurs:
1. Start where you are: Don’t wait for the perfect idea or the right moment. Find a small, safe first step and do it. Learn and grow as you go along. Follow your heart and feel the flow. See what attracts and lean into it. The time is now. Do it.
2. Hold it all lightly: Systemic change doesn’t happen in a linear way. It may surprise you where the real change happens – and when. Hold outcomes and time frames lightly. Be delighted at the unexpected ways change manifests and when you spot it happening recalibrate to support and stimulate that change. Hold yourself and the organisation to values and mission but create permeable plans. Be prepared to fail but also be prepared to do more than you ever could have imagined as you step out of the tight cage of your own expectations.
3. It’s all about the people: Hold very tightly to those that believe in you, share your values and bring both curiosity and generosity of spirit to the endeavour. Meet people where they are and keep looking for ways to help them meet their individual dreams within the collective. Celebrate and weave in all the individual brilliance and equally – individual weirdnesses. Find creative ways to harness and showcase the collective energy and ideas. Hold people to their highest. Give spaces for belonging and real connection. Be grateful and say how much you care, often.
4. Its all about you: Keep holding the red thread of possibility in every conversation even when you don’t know what garment you’re knitting with it. Keep your self-care high and your ego low. Be prepared to have edges knocked painfully off your own ways of doing and being – and realise that you too are being radically transformed. Stay confident and stay humble. In the end how you show up is everything. Back yourself. You’ve got this…
5. You have to stay in the system: It is very hard to sustain an organisation outside of commercial realities. Paying people less that their market value undermines the work you do to showcase an organisation as a demonstrator of new ways of doing. It has to turn a profit to be taken seriously, to keep people involved and to allow you to sustain yourself. Don’t skimp on commercial realism. Prune back some of the radical to allow for the mainstream to connect. Be pragmatic and be cunning. You can slowly, slowly move the boat away from the shore – but first it needs to float.
6. You have to stay outside the system: Keep the deep knowing that another world is possible Listen out for her breathing. Watch where you’ve been co-opted into existing realities that don’t serve people and planet. Smother the desire to fit in and conform. Be an activator rod for fresh thinking and attract people who hold a part of the beautiful new world our hearts yearn for.
7. Fun trumps everything: Joy is our human nature and in itself is a radical transformational tool. Allow for play, create space for daydreams and really enjoy the people around you. It is perhaps the whole point.
In the determination to lead a purposeful life it can be hard to notice how incremental steps add up to meaningful doing. Keep going. It is working.
Thank you to everyone who has walked these journeys with me over the past 12years. There are so many of you, yet I hold each of you dear and appreciate all that you are and that you brought. It is a real delight to see your own journeys progress and the lessons, ideas and connections from 6heads and She Leads Change ripple out.
We’ve done good.
And now…I’m holding the inquiry ‘What next?’.
What would you like to see manifest?
Lets begin.
With love,
Nicola
“Whatever you can dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!” Goethe
Green Sky Thinking 
So much wisdom in these reflections. I shall share them widely and come back to them often.