The power of disruption

Toddlers and elders win your hearts. I’ve covered an eclectic range of topics in this blog over the past eight years, and my last yarn about the kid and the coffee cup struck quite a chord with many of you. Equal to my stories about Joan, my now 107-year-old (!) mother- in-law.

I link every story to facilitation and the problems that facilitation helps to fix. The kid and the coffee cup story was about dealing with disrupters - you might recall I talked about Cranky Chris.

Thanks for sharing your stories about your own ‘Cranky Chrises’. But it was one response from a long-time reader in regional NSW that is the topic of this week’s yarn. She reminded me that disrupters may not always need to be ‘dealt’ with:

“We just completed one of our leadership events exploring the theme of disruption, very interesting and not all negative!”

A good point that I’d like to back up with a little evidence – from three different perspectives:
📷 photography,  💍 facilitation and  👗fashion.

📷 I looked for a picture of a ‘disruptor’ to accompany my earlier story as it would have been unethical and rude, not to say potentially defamatory, to use a one of the real Cranky Chris. My initial search on Pixabay and Unsplash resulted in light bulbs, explosions of colour and other evocations of wonder. Not a negative disruptor among them.

💍 That brings me to Thani, a positive disruptor in a group that was working towards consensus on how a city should allocate its budget (a ‘participatory budget’ process). Thani kept interrupting the flow of a workshop with her ‘what ifs’ and ‘maybes’ and ‘how abouts?’ as a group worked towards consensus for a participative budget process.

The group of 40 had a lot of ground to cover each Saturday over five weekends and were highly conscious of their opportunity to shape their city. They didn’t want to waste a single minute.

So, when Thani spoke up, as she did often, some sighed and rolled their eyes. I’m sure there were others, but it felt like Thani’s became the solo voice of disagreement for the many ways that the budget could be allocated. At one point, she moved all the visual elements of a carefully created map around to illustrate her point. But she was not out to persuade. She could just see other angles and different solutions, and felt it was important to share these. She certainly kept the group on their toes and many of her insights undoubtedly made their way into the final recommendations.

👗 I bet you were wondering about this one. Mary Quant, who died recently, was a phenomenally positive disruptor. She took on high fashion and the class system – and won. Her fashion was about much more than hemlines.

‘…she helped liberate a generation of post-war women who found themselves living utterly different lives from those of their mothers and grandmothers – and needed wardrobes to match.’ (Lauren Sams, AFR, 14/4/23)

As she put it: ‘Coco Chanel hated me…I can understand why.’

So, there you have it. For every Cranky Chris there is Thani or Mary Quant, influencing positive change.

Image: Goldfinch Productions

Hey – wondering about the 💍? First one to guess why I used this emoji for ‘facilitation’ gets a gift. Just email me with your suggestion in the subject field.

Links:

Download the (fl)awesome facilitator here
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