When protection becomes harm: Autoimmune Disease and the Movements We’re Asking Too Much Of
I've been in an autoimmune flare for the last six weeks handling a set of hives that my fiancé lovingly calls "chives." Whenever we talk about my condition in our home, it makes me laugh about something deeply frustrating and at times despairing.
It's also made me really reflective about the ways in which a body under attack for a long period of time will start to become unable to differentiate between the body and a disease. When you have an autoimmune disease your body attacks itself. The remedies are often immunosuppressants, steroids, rest, and water. There is no way out without really engaging your body in the process of powering down and pacing itself.
In so many ways, I see our movements going through the exact same story. We started this year with a looming authoritarian threat and we are ending the year fully having lived under authoritarianism for quite a few months. I've also watched as the movement attacks itself. We are crueler to each other than to the forces we're fighting. Our suspicion of all power instead of just coercive power. Our inability at times to think about tradeoffs to be made with collectives in mind - instead of our own personal or team preferences. I have watched those attacks make us more brittle with less trust or compassion and more certainty in our own rightness.
It's wild to watch what happens in my own body mirrored in our ecosystem. So what then do we do to lessen the autoimmune attacks we are experiencing? What is our ecosystem equivalent to steroids, water, and rest?
As we end the year, I really want to recommend that you start to think of big chunks of work that may need to be proactively sacrificed in the new year. Many of us are still setting goals and making plans as if we're in the before-times. It is not the before-times. We know that urgent emergent needs will come and we leave no space to respond to them. That lack of space makes us more tired and less patient.
I have repeated this to many people, so forgive me if you've already heard me say it. I watched seven organizations get the MacKenzie Scott grant money and the first move was to add capacity to their overworked teams. In all seven of those organizations the bandwidth did not decrease, the needs only increased as the staff did.
We need to get better at prioritization. That prioritization and intentional sacrifices will help us calm our immune system.
We also need to think of pacing and change management as a core responsibility of our operations and people teams. If we are creating symphonies - ops and people teams should be holding the baton. One of our clients tells me they do 70% of the work of other organizations in 30% of the time. This is because they have had a huge imagination for systems and automating where they can. This allows them to experiment and learn in ways that many struggle to do. A lack of systems in many organizations leads to replicating work, working in silos, or treating our teams/departments like kingdoms we need to defend instead of communities that need to strategize together.
We need to be less afraid of each other. We need to be more comfortable with generative conflict before it becomes dysfunctional conflict. I often watch teams avoid conflict until it is a roiling "can't be ignored mess" because they are afraid of offending/upsetting/negotiating with each other. They put trouble on a high-interest credit card until the bill became too big to ignore. We have to ask ourselves - why do we fear each other? Why is our social capital with each other so thin? Why are differences of opinion so catastrophic to organizational culture? What will it take for us to tell each other the truth and the context for how we got to that truth?
Last but not least, there is no way to do this without rest. We have to lose some of our most toxic habits that get in the way of rest. Checking work email on your phone because you've become habituated to it. Clocking out of work but engaging in the subjects you work on online through social media - making it so you're always thinking of the topics you work on during the day. Our aversion to play because it's "not the real work" makes us less able to be human and see the humans around us. We schedule and expect our teams to schedule work availability around the clock. If your team does not have time to play in their after work calendars because the during work calendars consistently take over - you are creating a less resilient team. We need to schedule play with the energy and dedication that we schedule work.
We are walking into a holiday season after having seen a year full of change. For many of us, if we aren't intentional, that pause might tempt us to avoid the necessary reflection this moment demands. We must grieve and celebrate and power down. That is what I'll be doing for the next two weeks as we take our winter break at Brava.
I hope you can find the time to be in your body. To understand the impact of your year on your body and life. To love fully and unabashedly, your loved ones. I am excited to see Brava Leadership Institute applications when we return. We are so grateful for you, community.
Happy Holidays,
Karla
