Burnout, imagination and hope: some reflections
By: Sophia Parker
Tags: Imagination, Hope, Charity, Civil Society

Illustration by Maurice Sendak, from “Open House for Butterflies” by Ruth Krauss

Burnout and bold thinking

I had intended to write this post a month after stepping down from my leadership position at Little Village. But that date came, and I still felt broken and exhausted. So I left it. Another month passed. Still, the cursor winked at me from the blank page around it. God, I must be really burnt out, I thought. I’d never been stuck for words before like that.

Until I stopped work in mid-February, I don’t think I’d realised how profoundly exhausted I was. I’d been in the job for five years, having launched Little Village when my youngest child was 3 weeks old. I juggled work with three small children and a partner who suffered a major breakdown 18 months ago.

Then the pandemic hit. Guiding a frontline organisation through a global crisis is not for the faint hearted. I felt a huge weight of responsibility for looking after our team, ensuring that they felt safe, and had the space to care for family, and in some cases to grieve for loved ones. Together we carried the fears and profound anxieties of the thousands of families we supported. Every day we navigated other people’s terrible situations and did what we could, while also coming to terms with the fact that it would never be enough.

I’m not sharing this in a bid for sympathy. I’m aware that I’m enormously privileged to be able to budget to take some time out of paid work right now, before I start my new job in September. And I know that many, many people are working harder than I have been, with less security, fewer prospects and an absence of support from a social network. So yes, I am lucky — I feel that more deeply than ever after five years of working up close to poverty.

So the reason I want to talk about this stuff is because I’m worried. Unhelpful systems and structures get perpetuated when we only have the energy for tweaks and small improvements. And when people are in burnout mode, they lose perspective and confidence — which for me at least, made me doubtful I could ever pull the radical stuff off, even if I’d had the energy for anything so big or exhausting in the first place.

If our leaders are so caught up in the work that they can’t reflect, dream, and hope for a better world, then we’re gambling our capacity to bring about the scale of change we need now.

‘Imagination is a form of planning’

I love this quote, from Gloria Steinham. I take from it that all the most radical ideas start in the same place — our imaginations. We have to allow a space for dreams to happen, in order for new ideas to take shape.

I worry that there is such a dysfunctional working culture in civil society organisations that this simply isn’t happening. It’s disarmingly easy to get caught up with keeping the show on the road in the charity world. In a tough and unforgiving funding environment, sustaining our organisations is often a challenging enough job (and let’s face it, the funding application forms almost always force us into a narrow organisational mindset — the subject of another blog/rant). All the incentives drive us towards a focus on keeping our organisations alive, rather than changing the world, as an end goal.

“Designing policy or strategy without an imaginative sense of where you are going means your best efforts will land you toward the front of the status quo, but not ahead of it.” — Al Etmanski

But keeping the show on the road simply is not enough for the scale of the challenges we now face. Enormous holes are appearing in our social fabric as poverty and inequality continue to rise, and as we hurtle towards catastrophic environmental destruction at an alarming speed. Our current democratic and economic frameworks seem ill-equipped to handle any of this.

A response that’s proportionate to these challenges will require deep change and action on many levels. We will need reorient ourselves towards a way of living together that’s grounded in shared prosperity rather than growth alone; to shift towards regeneration as an organising principle, rather than extraction. That means we’ll need to re-imagine the way we work, for example, and the way we care; we will need to think again about how we look after our shared resources like land and public spaces, and how we choose to distribute assets between generations.

I do not believe we’ll be able to make any of this happen if our leaders are so up against the wall that they can’t engage their own imaginations in how to tackle the change that’s needed. Because if as leaders we can’t imagine, how on earth are we going to ignite our collective imagination about the world we want to create?

Geoff Mulgan has written persuasively about the need to address our social imagination deficit here. It feels like there’s a growing energy around this work. See Rob Hopkins’ book, and his podcast with Panthea Lee and Cassie Robinson. for starters. You could also check out Ann Pendleton Julian’s work, or listen to the lovely soundcasts of New Constellations. I’m very excited about emerging work around what an ‘imagination infrastructure’ might look like to embed the sort of leadership qualities I’m talking about here.

“What if what we see of the world around us is really just what we’ve been told to see?… when we start to let our curiosity wander, we start to see there are other ways things can be” — Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

The bottom line is that imagination needs time, space and stimulation to come alive. We need leaders who are curious and who like to dream. Leaders who love to cultivate an expansive hinterland of ideas and influences, and who assemble diverse teams who bring with a breadth of experience and thought to the task. Leaders who are able to think boldly, inclusively and with a scale of ambition that matches the challenges we now face. We will not get any of that if we can’t design leadership roles that allow for space to breathe.

The patterning of hope

Burnout crowded out my space to dream; it also killed my hope. I lost my joy, and with it my belief that things could change for the better. The awfulness of pandemic didn’t help, as we saw again and again how unfairly it hit the families we support. As 2020 unfolded, I felt impotent — raging and impotent. Existing for any period of time in these energetically negative emotions is an exhausting experience. I started to feel that we can never solve poverty, that there will always be children whose lives don’t start in the way they deserve. I’m not usually a person who carries round that kind of fatalism: I felt out of place in my own mind.

“Despair is thinking tomorrow will be the same as today” — Rob Bell

Over the last three months I’ve been taking steps to recover from this place. I learnt to meditate and have done so daily since February. For the last month or so, I’ve exercised regularly (I was too knackered before then to contemplate running, even when I knew it would be good for me). I’ve been doing a lot of creative writing; I’ve walked miles and miles with friends, or in the company of podcasts and great music. I’ve devoured books, often having two or three on the go at once (an annoying habit, I know). I’ve actually enjoyed playing with my children. I feel less brittle and more connected.

And I’m struck by how different the world looks from here.

Yes, of course, the scale of the problems are the same. My increase in joy and connection hasn’t changed the world. But what’s different is my response. I feel the glimmer of hope warming me up again, despite the fact I really don’t know if we have what it takes to tackle the interconnected crises we’re now facing. I like Rebecca Solnit’s description of what hope is in this context:

“Hope … means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is not possible without hope.”

Hope is a gamble. We don’t know that our work will make the difference that’s needed. But in recognising that uncertainty, we are also able to see that our actions — our choice to take action — has the potential to make a difference. As a historian, I love this. Things have changed. And so we can change them again. This is the message we need all our civil society leaders need to truly believe, in their hearts as well as their heads. It is from here they can convey the possibility of a better world, and the potential we all carry to act in ways that move us towards that world.

My personal experience is that hope is harder to summon when you’re buried in the overwhelm of burn-out. To be able to “throw ourselves actively into what is becoming” — in Ernst Bloch’s words — requires energy and bravery. We need leaders who have the space and support for these qualities.

One final reflection on this. I am a white, middle class, educated woman. I have enjoyed privilege all my life. I am not carrying with me the weight of years of discimination or oppression — and yet I still feel all of this. To nurture leaders from a more diverse set of backgrounds and experiences, then the task of creating space to ignite their imaginations, dreams and power to hope becomes even more important — and it needs to be coupled with time and space for healing and recovery (check out the work of Black Thrive and Healing Justice for more on this agenda).

The beginning of the next chapter

I’m doing a LOT of thinking about the culture and behaviours we need to grow at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation when I start work there in September, in order for us to play a role in moving towards a more regenerative, socially just world. I suspect I’ll be writing lots more about this in the months to come so please treat this blog as some personal reflections. I’d love to hear from others about their experiences too.

I also want to acknowledge that while I’m writing here about leadership, I fully believe we need to scaffold that leadership with better institutions that are also geared towards nurturing more collective imagination and the development of plausible alternative futures. There’s lots of work going on about this and in fact you can join a webinar on the subject of ‘imagination infrastructure’ with an incredible line up of speakers in a couple of weeks’ time — see here for more.

There are many other leadership qualities that really matter (and no one has summed them up more beautifully than Graham Leicester here, in my view). But I see a capacity to imagine, and a deeply-held sense of hope, as pretty foundational to everything else. At their heart, they are both expressions of the belief that another world is possible. And surely, after the year we’ve had, we should be able to see just how vital that kind of visionary energy is going to be, as we tackle the enormous global challenges of this next decade.