The Power Shift: Decolonising Development

Driving organisational change starts with conversations. Ajoy Datta interviewed.

• Kate Bird • Season 1 • Episode 31

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In this week’s episode, Ajoy Datta talks to us about organisational change, leadership development, and policy, advocacy and influencing. Ajoy tells us about promoting change within an organisation with a focus on difference and diversity. He focuses on an “unconventional” approach which highlights the complexity in working relationships and makes space for emotions. 

Working alongside people to unlock their knowledge and transform their conversations is part of the action learning approach for organisational change that Ajoy speaks about. When thinking about decoloniality, this approach means interrogating the ways in which coloniality is being reproduced in daily life.

Ajoy is a freelance consultant specialising in two areas:

The first is organisational change and leadership development: Here he works with leaders, teams, organisations and networks taking an approach which combines psychodynamics, systems and complexity. 

The second is policy advocacy or influencing. Here he informs, designs and evaluates work to influence policy and practice drawing on studies of the policy process, political economy approaches and outcome mapping.

If you’re interested to find out more about Ajoy’s work, take a look here:

Relevant resources:

Ajoy:

So as a consultant trying to bring about organisational change, I can then use my body as an instrument to gauge what might be happening in the system. So it's being able to use my feelings as data for what's going on. And it also means that while we may be individuals in an organisation or in a workplace, the organisation is in us. The workplace is in us. So organisations can pull us into behaving in certain ways, undertaking certain roles, which maybe you haven't consciously agreed to, consciously chosen.

Kate:

Hello. I'm Professor Kate Bird, and this is the PowerShift Decolonising Development. In this week's episode, we speak to Ajoy Datta about organisational change, leadership development, and policy advocacy and influencing. Ajoy tells us about promoting change within an organisation with a focus on difference and diversity. He talks about his unconventional approach, which highlights complexity in working relationships and make space for emotions and for people to show up as their whole selves. He works alongside people to unlock their knowledge and transforming organisations using action learning approach for organisational change. When thinking about decoloniality, the approach he uses means interrogating ways in which intersectional difference in coloniality is reproduced within organizations and how people internalize and then reproduce the messages that organizations communicate to people about them and what they have to offer, replicating power hierarchies and hegemonic thinking. Listen on for more. Welcome to the Power Shift Decolonising Development podcast series, seeking to bring together thinkers, practitioners, and activists to share ideas, inspire change, and identify tools to action. I'm Professor Kate Bird, socio economist and director of the Development Hub. Today's co host is Dr. Nompilo Ndlovu. Over to you, Nompilo.

Nompilo:

Greetings, I'm Dr. Nompilo Ndlovu. I am a Zimbabwean living and working in South Africa. I'm an oral historian who applies gender frameworks to my work with communities in Africa. Recent work has included involvement in a mixed method study on poverty dynamics in Zimbabwe, where I led the work on gender and marginalisation. My Ph. D. focus on mass violence, memory and local transitional justice in post colonial Zimbabwe. Back to you, Kate.

Kate:

Thanks Nompilo. So today we're speaking with Ajoy Datta. Ajoy is a freelance consultant specialising in two areas. The first is organisational change and leadership development. Here he works with leaders, teams, organisations, and networks, taking an approach which combines psychodynamics, systems, and complexity. The secondary he works on is policy, advocacy, and influencing. Here he informs, designs, and evaluates work to influence policy and practice, drawing on studies of the policy process, political economy approaches, and outcome mapping. For more on Ajoy and the work he does, click on the show notes below this episode. So my first question for you, Ajoy. Ajoy, you work on difference within teams and within organisations, or at least that's part of your work. Can you tell our audience a little bit about yourself and what drew you to this work?

Ajoy:

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks both. So just a little background. I initially trained as an engineer a while ago, specialising in manufacturing and management. And it's interesting, there's a lot of tools and frameworks which are used to promote change, which stem from the engineering sector. And I guess we know that engineering consultancy has swept the board when it comes to big development contracts these days. So after the engineering degree, I spent three and a half years in Zambia, initially as a physics teacher, and then as a program officer for an NGO called VSO, found myself at the ODI as an intern and worked my way up to a senior researcher. And I specialise in sort of how you get research off the shelf and into action. And I was doing like studies of the policy process in places like Indonesia, Vietnam, South Africa. And I would turn those studies of the policy process into advice for people who wanted to influence policy. So I find myself jet setting around the world, running workshops with researchers and practitioners, sharing an approach that my program had developed to help people influence policy. Basically, including a large suite of tools and techniques they could use. Sometimes these sessions lasted for a few hours, sometimes they lasted for a few days. Usually the output was some sort of analysis and an outline of a plan, which people could then use to influence policy. But, anecdotally, I'd get the sense that people sort of left those plans on the shelf, and people just went back to grappling with present day situation, present day problems. So I had this sort of curiosity about how change happens in societies, but then that sort of shifted or there was sort of an expansion of that into sort of, how does change happen in organisations? How do people in teams and organisations do things differently? And there was a moment in 2010 where I managed to get some funding from the program to go to Bonn in Germany for a workshop. And it was on complexity. It was a management and evaluation, and it was hosted by something called the European Association for Development, Research and Training. And the seminars run by Chris Mould, a guy who's from the University of Hertfordshire, ran their Doctor of Management Program and their Complexity Management Centre. And so this is where I sort of acquired a more, sort of in depth understanding of what complexity really means in social and political terms. But what was interesting after the workshop, Chris sent the participants a message, um, and he included in that message a link to a video showing a murmuration of starlings. And I don't know if you've ever seen a murmuration of starlings. It's pretty, pretty amazing. It's quite dramatic. And he used it to sort of describe what he was calling stable instability. So he talked about, how despite there being no plan, no blueprint, no one in control, there was some sort of order. It was unpredictable, this order. It was a sort of an unstable stability or a stable instability, as he called it. And yeah, I suppose engaging with some of the materials that were being produced by University of Hertfordshire, I soon realised that all this work we've been doing on capacity development, organisational change, trying to get people to use what they developed in these workshops, it's really poorly theorised, it's often based on if you do this, then that will happen, and when you dig deeper, all that's based on engineering, sort of cybernetics. And that in itself is based on control. So this idea you can control people, this idea that you can predict the future, the assumption that change only happens if you plan for it and if leaders only do the right thing in the right way at the right time, and that was really odd because when it came to promoting change across society, there were movements like doing development differently, thinking, working politically. They realise that the complexity, the political nature of development, you need to be iterative, you need to be locally led, you need to be adaptive, sometimes you might not know what a good objective is until you see an outcome. But when it came to organisations, people tend to stop thinking. I don't know why it's really odd. So I started challenging colleagues, about the approaches we were taking to facilitating change. And this elicited strong reactions in them, but also me. And over time, you know, I experienced a lot of different emotions, anger, rage, shame, depression, and finding joy and contentedness was difficult. And I guess going back to the context, I was working in, I was the only person of color in my particular program and very few across the organisation. But I didn't think about it too much. So I internalised a lot of what was happening. It was all, it was me, it was them, you know, it was one or the other. But I suppose rather than burying and moving on, I wanted to learn more. I wanted to learn more, you know, find out what was going on in me. What was going on in the organisation? How was the organisation getting into me? And there was an important moment, where I attended a conference run by the University of Hertfordshire. And, so I found myself with 50 other people who were also curious about managing change. And, I was able to get into conversations with them so much more quickly. I didn't have the defensiveness, about why these sorts of conversations were taking place and it was really cool just to hear other people who are in the same space, struggling with similar sorts of issues. So, from that, I kind of acknowledge that organisational life unfolds through communication and conversation. And that kind of informed my approaches to then doing capacity development work. And I remember sort of having a lot of fun, for example, doing live scenario planning and group discussion storytelling with policymakers in places like Zimbabwe or policy offices at the Food and Agricultural Organisation. And then I suppose that led to me doing a year long foundation course in group analysis at the Institute for Group Analysis in London. We wanted to want to continue that study and I went next door to the Tavistock Clinic, did a 2 years master's program. So on basically use a system psychodynamic framework. I might touch on this a little later. I did a coaching course last year and then I suppose the place where I did that master, the Tavistock Clinic, they sort of invited me back onto the staff to help run the master's program that I did. So in that process, I've grown into sort of a consultant offering advisory services in both advocacy and policymaking on one hand, but also organisations and leadership with a focus on difference and diversity as well.

Kate:

Thank you so much for sharing that story. It's a very interesting narrative that you've outlined there and I'm fascinated by your reaction to working in quite a dysfunctional sounding organisation where you were one of few people of color and you weren't sure whether it was you or them in terms of the feelings that you were feeling of, I think you said shame and rage about your experiences within the organisation. So in my understanding is that a lot of people of color within the UK development sector actually leave the sector entirely because they feel that they are being othered within the sector itself. But your reaction was a very different one. It was to go and tool up so that you could understand your experience and so you could help others to perhaps decode and understand their experiences. I don't know if you would frame it in those terms, but I mean, reflecting on what you've just said, it sounds to me as though you decided not to be beaten. You decided to understand and to tool up and to step forwards.

Ajoy:

Yeah, I suppose it's kind of a yes and no, I suppose. I left the organisation I was working for and I went freelance, although I did join a consulting firm shortly afterwards, and I've left that now and I'm properly freelance, I guess, but, yeah, I suppose there was something about understanding that bringing about change was certainly not a technical thing, it was a socio political thing, where all sorts of differences come into play. I'm not just someone with a brown skin tone. There's gender issues. So, I'm a man, a male, I'm in a male body. I'm quite sort of tall. I'm 6 foot 3. Obviously I'm brown skinned, you know, a child of a migrant parents. And there's class issues as well, which are sort of invisible or less visible. Sometimes you can tell by, it might be an accent. But in my case, I've sort of masked that. I've got this slightly clipped accent which I developed when I was a teenager, I suppose. I'm not quite sure. if that was intentional, but, I guess, you know, class issues do certainly get in the way of me being able to sort of connect with my power and authority. So I think I've sort of learned that, yeah, these things are incredibly complicated. Yeah. And it's not just one thing. it's often many things happening at the same time.

Kate:

Yes, thank you. I think that that insight into intersectionality is really useful and within the British context class is ever so important, and I would say within the development sector even more so, because it's round full of people, with the just right education and the just right background, and that's maybe lessening over time, but certainly when I joined the sector, there was a whole load of gatekeeping going on around education and class and privilege and so on. So I'm going to move on to my second question now, which is that, building on what you've just said, actually, you take an unconventional approach to organisational change. Can you tell us a bit more about the way that you work and give us some insights into the benefits of this approach, the approach that you use over others, over other approaches?

Ajoy:

Yeah, yeah. And I suppose, you talked about unconventional approach. I'm wondering what is a conventional approach? And I guess to sort of caricature a little bit, there's often an assumption that we are as human beings, we're sort of rational. And we change if we're told to, or if we have a plan that we react to sort of carrots and sticks. So, I guess my sort of approach and the approach of many others as well, starts with acknowledging that we are human, we, in the fullest sense, you know, we are imaginative, expressive, thinking, feeling, and we're in these bodies, and then when we come together to do stuff with other people, with all our differences, it can generate all sorts of feelings, all sorts of reactions and responses, you know, joy, wonder, but also anxiety. And that happens because work really matters to us. We care about succeeding. But I suppose when people maybe experience some of the more difficult feelings, we protect ourselves from that by denying them, by pushing them away out of sort of conscious awareness, because that, you know, too painful, or our experiences might slip out through the Freudian slip, you know, or mistakes, so called mistakes, accidents, we also protect ourselves by dividing our emotions into sort of differentiated elements and we locate them in other people. So we might say, oh, you know, what terrible manager, you know, she doesn't know what she's doing. Oh, isn't she amazing or isn't, isn't he a wonderful, these massive labels, I suppose, that we give people, or these perceptions that we have of other people might be shaped by stereotypes. Okay. It's shaped by stereotypes that we have of people who look and sound in a certain type, a certain way, or they might be shaped by historical figures in our mind. So, we might act as if our manager is a stern father, or a colleague is a rival sibling, you know. And when these perceptions, particularly when lots of people are perceiving these things, that person or that group of people might actually start taking up some of those attributes. So if we project certain attributes into an individual, say a person of color you might project a sense of subservience into maybe someone who's got sort of Asian heritage. You know, if over time, if a number of people think that, they might actually start responding to that and start behaving in that way, even though they might be fully human and have all sorts of other attributes. So it's quite a powerful mechanism through which, you know, people can start reinforcing stereotypes. And so I suppose the point I'm trying to get to is that the feelings that we feel aren't necessarily our own. They might have been put into us by other people who perhaps find it too difficult to bear themselves. So very simply, if someone's angry, they'll shout at me and suddenly I'm feeling quite fearful, they put that sort of anger into me. They've evacuated that feeling into me as a way of them feeling better. So as a consultant trying to bring about organisational change, I can then use my body as an instrument to gauge what might be happening in the system. So it's being able to use my feelings as data for what's going on. And it also means that while we may be individuals in an organisation or in a workplace, the organisation is in us. The workplace is in us. So organisations can pull us into behaving in certain ways, undertaking certain roles, which maybe you haven't consciously agreed to, consciously chosen. So that's kind of the first aspect of my work. And the second is to do with taking an action learning or action research approach to facilitating change. So, yeah, again, let me go back to sort of what I think is an orthodox approach to change. And again, I'm sort of caricaturing, but often, you know, it's quite linear. So you have a diagnostic, you collect data through interviews, you translate that into an action plan or a strategy, you roll that out. Again, sort of using maybe some training, some awareness raising, some carrots, some sticks, and then you sort of monitor and evaluate over time. And I guess there are many reasons why this doesn't always work. And one of them is that if we sort of pull back and take a sort of an emotional point of view or a social or political, thinking and doing things differently takes people into unknown territory. And, they might be sort of, as is often the case, there's a toolkit or a formal set of guidelines, this is what you should do. But it doesn't really tell you what to do in a specific situation. Or if it did, then you'd end up just spending your whole life writing toolkits and guidelines, you know. So what do staff do? What do people do? They use their discretion. They use their tacit knowledge. They might sort of negotiate with other people. What to do, how do you operationalise a plan? And if you don't know what to do, you tend to fall back on the familiar, what you did before, or you might think, well, actually, I'm going to be monitored and evaluated for this. So I better look as if I'm doing something different, you know, so you game the system, right? There's something performative, perhaps, but, I guess in the political economy lexicon, you might use the word isomorphic mimicry, you kind of say one thing and do another. So a plan doesn't really address any of these sort of outcomes that I've discussed. So I think it's better to take sort of an action learning or an action research approach. What is that practice? So it kind of means working with the staff, in its broader sense, not just the senior leadership team on an iterative basis, help them to think, to think about the situation they find themselves in. What are the issues that need attention? Why is the situation the way it is? So really getting to the why. And rather than building or rather than commissioning an expert to come in and deliver solutions, which kind of promotes dependency, I think through the development sector, dependency is a really strong dynamic. So the idea is to unlock the knowledge people already have. Help them to sort of reach conclusions, find and put into practice appropriate solutions. And then, once they do something. So once they have a sort of maybe a way forward, they do something and then they realise that, well, actually, it hasn't quite turned out the way I hoped, you know, that there's an unintended consequence. There's an event that happened. There's something which is unwanted perhaps, you know, and so reflection on action is really important, that regular reflection on action. I suppose another way of putting it is, if an organisation is essentially, if you strip away everything apart from the people, it's people talking to one another, right? It's conversations that people are having. So, what I'm saying is that maybe people need to sort of just reflect on the sorts of conversations they're having. And that can itself be quite transformative, you know, thinking about something in a different way might inform how you actually go about doing things together. So when it comes to facilitating change, people often have discussions, but they're quite tightly controlled. So I tend to sort of allow staff to speak as freely and widely as they can about their work situation, their relationships, their experiences, anything else that sort of might be significant to them. And the approach is to use open ended questions. And I think the stories staff tell, the way in which they tell them, the points that they emphasise, the emotions that they sort of display, it all reveals data about the organisation. And I suppose this is the way in which I get below the surface. So going beyond sort of the formal stuff, the objectives, the systems, the processes, to really understand people's attitudes. What do they really find important? You know, where are the conflicts? What are the power relations? Where's the competition? You know, all those things which sort of both facilitate and get in the way of the work that the organisation is trying to do. So that's a little bit about the approach I take, and I suppose just to sort of finish off this part, you know, I guess to summarise, I take a sort of a guide on the side rather than a stage on the stage kind of approach. So not wanting to come in to be the expert who has all the answers in the solution. To actually facilitate the organisation themselves to actually show leadership, which I think sometimes it can be quite lacking in some organisations. It is a more labor intensive process, and often you do sort of receive comments like, well, aren't you the expert? We brought you in for a reason, or you might get attacked for not actually giving them the answer. And that's a really difficult thing to respond to because obviously you are being paid by them. So I think then that's obviously up to the consultant to figure out how they respond. But I think it needs to be sort of embedded in the contracting process that you're coming in to help them think, not to do the thinking for them.

Kate:

Thank you, Ajoy, I do find it quite a radical approach, this approach that you are using, because my experience of both kind of strategic thinking, you know, the thinking that goes around an organisational strategy process. And also my experience of organisational management is that it's rigid, it's linear, it's top down, it's quite positivist that you do this and the result is this. Rather than the approach that you're outlining, which is much more, it's got much more flow to it, I think, and it's almost inherently radical and bottom up. But that's how it feels to me from the way that you're describing it. Anyway, at this point, I'm going to pass over to Nompilo for the next question.

Nompilo:

Thank you so much, Kate and Ajoy. It's quite interesting to hear you talk about controlled discussions, competition, what your role is in facilitating these conversations, and I know you've already started to touch on ideas of power and positionality in strategic planning, thinking. But, please, can you tell us about what is often left unsaid in teams and organisations and other power and positionalities? Is this a useful entry point in thinking about enabling organisations to embed anti-racist and decolonising practice?

Ajoy:

Yeah, yeah. Where do you start with that? Big question, isn't it? I mean, I suppose just thinking about coloniality. So what's coloniality? It's a continuation of colonial relations and their influence on political, economic, social knowledge systems. So decoloniality and decolonisation is to de link from that. But I suppose before you can go to action, you've got to interrogate the ways in which we are reproducing systems of coloniality in daily life, and that would inevitably manifest itself in relations between people in teams and organisations, you know. So I suppose if you're curious about this again, I'll take a sort of an action learning approach. So you ask particular questions. I sort of work in a consultancy kind of setting. I'm often part of teams, which sort of mobilise at very short notice to respond to particular opportunities. And so the question is, who gets the opportunity to be part of these teams, who gets to lead. How does that correlate with characteristics of identity? What sort of context are these decisions taken in? What perspectives might be missing? So when I think about team selection, I think about the glass cliff. So, there is a sort of increasing awareness. People are more conscious about difference and diversity. So there is this desire to appoint people of color, I suppose, to put it very bluntly, to senior roles and teams, what I'm increasingly finding is that this is often done in a very high risk context. So people are appointed to senior positions in contexts which are very difficult, where the risk of failure, so to speak, or not doing a very good job is very high. And, perhaps the competition for being appointed is actually not as high. And so when things do go wrong, you can blame the individual rather than the context, and that reinforces a particular dynamic that people of color perhaps aren't quite as good. So just to sort of complexify some of the appointments that, I mean, I've certainly been in situations recently, very difficult projects. And actually it's a pattern which I've seen over my sort of 15 year career as a consultant, often brought into rescue projects or to take on very difficult projects. Another question I would ask is how is the energy in a team or organisation channeled especially when stress levels rise So who's left with what in terms of feelings, in terms of perceptions? Again, what are the patterns when it comes to identity characteristics? And it's a big project funded by a North American philanthropy organisation. They put a big premium on perfection. Things have to be perfect. Things have to be just the way they want it. And that creates a lot of stress, a lot of tension in the team. And it was interesting who was left with what in terms of feeling or perception. So, I was a team leader. I got quite a lot of negative feedback. There was a project manager who is Black Nigerian. He was under a lot of pressure. There was a designer who was kind of beautifying our PowerPoint slides. She got a lot of grief as well, and she's Bangladeshi heritage, British born and brought up, I think. There were other people of colour on the team. There were also people with white European heritage on the team as well. But from my perspective, I was interested in who got the grief, you know. There's something about who's able to connect with their power, who's able to take up their authority to follow through on conscious choices, who gets easily mobilised by the team, by other people's projections. So, for example, there was a Black Nigerian man who was working as a project manager. I don't think he should have been in that role. You should be in a more senior role. The organisation brought him in as a project manager, rather than a technical specialist. And he looked as if he was really struggling. And in the end, the funder actually suggested that he take a step back, and that he was replaced by somebody else. So there was a question I had whether he was struggling or whether we were making him struggle. You know, did we come with perceptions that he would struggle and he was landed with all these perceptions. And in the end, you reinforce the attributes that people are putting into you, you know. Yeah, so, maybe last question is, what roles do people take up? What formal, informal roles do people take up? So, I've talked about sort of formal roles, but there's lots of informal roles.So, for example, in a project I'm working on at the moment, there's four members in the team, three guys, one woman. I think the three guys, I'm the only person of color. Three guys are older and the woman is younger, I'd say. And it's interesting the role that she's taking up, you know, she's doing a lot of work for the group, she hasn't got as many days as us, she's overshot her days massively and yet she's wanting to take notes, she's wanting to help out, and we've kind of let this happen. To me, they haven't stepped in and say, actually, that's not your role, or maybe you want to share those roles. So there's a feeling that she has, perhaps in the group, projected into her that she needs to almost be the group's administrator, I mean, there's a lot there, so I'll pause.

Nompilo:

Yeah, there's a lot to think about. Let's proceed to the next question. Thank you for sharing your ideas with us today, quite frankly, I should add. To finish up, can you kindly identify a practical first step that our listeners and viewers can take to support decolonisation and shifting power, whether they are members of the engaged general public or work in the development sector?

Ajoy:

Yeah. Well, I think for me, the first step, or maybe there's some little baby steps I can talk about. One is noticing, really paying attention, to yourself, to others. I suppose when it comes to yourself, your feelings, your thoughts. So for example, when you come into contact, you know, regardless of what body you're in, when you come into contact with other bodies, how do you feel? How do you feel when you come into contact with a white body? Or how do you feel when you come into contact with a black or brown body? What thoughts come up? What associations do you make? Where does your mind immediately go? I suppose when it comes to the feelings, you know, do you feel anxious? Do you feel safe? Do you feel comfortable? Do you feel unsure? What judgments do you make? So there's something about, can you refrain? I suppose we all need to make judgments to move on in life, to get things done, to get through the day. But there are moments when perhaps coming to judgments and conclusions may not be very helpful. So can you refrain from acting out a particular feeling or passing judgment until the last possible moment, can you, acknowledge everyone as fully human, so that'd be my sort of first kind of thing or one thing, I'd suggest you do. Another thing, which is maybe a bit more risky is sometimes, when you're working in these sort of cross cultural contexts, I think naming the differences in people's identity and acknowledging them might be helpful. Because I think a lot of the time that does shape how you get to know each other, especially when you don't name it. So actually naming it, and actually even improve, you know, it's a risky thing to do. I know, but, sometimes I think it can be quite powerful. Naming difference is one thing, but also just talking about how do you relate to one another and how might that be affected by issues around power? And, these projections that we make, it is natural. It's part of being human. And I think that's based on the fact that if you don't talk about something, you make it really hard to actually do anything about it. So there's something about, can you not only name it, but also talk about it, talk about how you're relating to one another. I guess maybe one other thing is, something around safety and, you know, we all jump to conclusions. We all pass judgment. And I wonder if, I mean, that's part of being human. So there is a culture of punishing people if they get things wrong and I think what that does is make us more performative, and make us more careful and cautious about what we say. So in the end, a lot of it goes unsaid. You think one thing, you feel one thing, but you say something else. And obviously there's brutal acts of violence and verbal violence, which can be awful. And I'm not suggesting, we let that go. But I think there is more subtlety, which I'm suggesting that we express forgiveness and so there's something about whether we can... there's a phrase I came across the other day decriminalising bias, you know, someone called Pooja Sachdev, who's a sort of prominent actor in the diversity field, she talks about this. So there's something about decriminalising bias, but also forgiveness. Can we forgive? There's something about how those in power, those who were in their pursuit of power kind of lost something of themselves, they've lost a part of their sort of certain sets of values. And so those who are on the receiving end, perhaps need to give them something they've lost in the form of forgiveness only if they're open to receiving. So, yeah, there's a number of practical first steps.

Nompilo:

Okay. Kate, any last thoughts? I'll hand over to you.

Kate:

Thank you, Nompilo. Well, I loved what you had to say, Ajoy. I think some of it will put a cat amongst the pigeons. It's not straightforward bite sised stuff, is it? It's quite a systemic shift in the way that we relate to each other in organisations and how we relate to each other in teams. And I think it's quite radical and I think it's also doesn't fit neatly in to the shift the power movement or the decolonisation movement. It's very much part of it, but it's an unusual take on driving change and working better together. I think it's very powerful. And I think this point that you make about forgiveness is a very interesting one, because we've had other speakers talk about forgiveness and healing. And I think if I understand it rightly, what you're saying is that we can't move forwards together to improve relationships and break down barriers and break down silos and develop trust if we're looking out for someone to get something wrong and then pouncing on them and giving them a good whack because they've done something wrong. It's about perhaps acknowledging that they've done something wrong, but then moving forwards. I don't know if I've summarised that correctly, but that's kind of what I've taken from what you're saying. You don't ignore when somebody's done something wrong, but you have the opportunity for forgiveness because otherwise there's no chance of progress. We get kind of stuck. Would you like to kind of just have a last word on that and then we'll finish up.

Ajoy:

Yeah, I suppose just going back to the first part of what you said around this being sort of a radical approach. And I suppose it's interesting, isn't it? Because this approach I think is befriending reality. It's going with the grain. It's living with the way we, in which we relate to one another. For example, you talked about bashing people over the head, that's carrots and sticks. And that's not how people want to go about living their life. Right. You know, so it's radical. Yes, but it's also acknowledging the reality on the ground. And I suppose moving forward, trying to change the way we relate to one another. I mean, it's hugely complicated, isn't it? It's not just a one way thing. So there's often a power asymmetry. So those with more power need to do something different. Those with less power also need to do something different because it's a dynamic that's been set up. And obviously, those with less power have fewer resources in the broad, broader sense of the word. But the power isn't all in favor of one. There's an asymmetry. But, yeah, those with less power, those who are oppressed to do have some agency. So the question is, how can they change the way they relate to one another. And often, these movements, collectivisation is a very important part of that conversation, I think.

Kate:

Yeah, thank you. I think there's lots of food for thought here, and I'm looking forward to re listening to this interview and sitting and pondering deeply because I think it's a very thoughtful piece. So, thank you so much and I'd encourage our listeners and viewers to look at the show notes and find out more about Ajoy. You can look at him on LinkedIn and find out what he's saying about the world there. And, I would like to say goodbye from me and Nompilo, if you'd like to say a quick goodbye to our audience as well.

Nompilo:

All righty, thank you all and look forward to re listening to this when it comes out. All righty.