Roles and Contributions

Perhaps more ambiguous than other topics in this series, yet something we can all relate to, is the idea of the many roles we play in life. This session explored how we can harness the different ways people can contribute to our change work through embracing the variety of roles we can each play over time. For this conversation, we were joined by contributors Samantha Slade and Siana Bangura.

While it's easy to default to job titles or the roles we feel most comfortable with, it's crucial to challenge these notions and binaries of single identities. By inviting plurality and fluidity, we can challenge assumptions and frameworks that keep us stuck. This is particularly important as people bring so much of themselves, both seen and unseen, to change work.

Our contributors for the session modelled this beautifully, with their expansive roles and identities creating the backdrop for the conversation.

Samantha Slade, whose roles include being Co-director at Percolab Coop, a strategist, facilitator, and practitioner - curious about all things collective governance and participatory leadership. And Siana Bangura is a wearer of many hats and roles, including being a writer, producer, campaigner, and systems change practitioner. Siana spoke about why knowing the role you play in changemaking is important to your story, referencing the social change ecosystem map framework, developed by Deepa Iyer in 2017, as being a key resource for her being able to do this.

There was a lot of talk in the session about the limitations of language. Job titles can be coded and bound up in a whole set of assumptions and projections which can be restrictive. Job descriptions are fixed, can become limited and create stuckness - Samantha spoke about ‘role stewards’, an approach they use as Percolab to create more of a dynamic conversation about roles needed over time to enable people’s energies and skills to become more aligned and in service of the work. A few different groups have used and adapted this approach since the session too - both to plan a new piece of work or as a team reflection activity to review what did or didn’t work.

It is key to be honest with yourself and your team about the energy and capacity you have. Understanding your own needs and desires and honouring them while managing collective responsibilities can feel like an increasingly delicate balance. Just because you’ve played a role before, doesn’t mean you always want to, or have to. Learning to celebrate the ‘no’ and intentional non-involvement is just as important as ‘doing’ more. Enabling this, Siana spoke on the importance of nurturing a support network - people who hold you “accountable in a compassionate way.”

Diving further into this topic brought up explorations and questions around identity, and seeing the ability to work with cycles as a useful underlying practice for this. The ability to let go, allowing parts of us to die that are no longer serving us, and creating and inviting new roles in, makes for a great practice ground for this.

Thank you to session participant Fanny Monod-Mitrev for this beautiful scribing illustration of our time together:

If you're interested in bringing this learning into your organisation or network, get in touch with Sean, our Learning and Practice Partner Lead. To keep inquiring with us as we explore more themes, subscribe to the School newsletter for systems change insights, inspiration and resources.