These past 6 months have seen me working in partnership with L'Oréal and CEDEP in a series of 'Frozen Picture' workshops that have helped L'Oréal senior management to understand new ways of thinking about leadership as the company continues to grow and expand it's global operations.

Like many companies, L'Oréal is looking to understand more about the shifting landscape of maintaining a strong brand as the company moves into new markets, whilst also leading and empowering their regional teams to be innovative, entrepreneurial, 'enabling' leaders that are able to develop new products and services for consumers around the world.

We started with leading workshops that use the technique of 'Frozen Pictures' as a way to encapsulate key ideas in this space.  Participants were asked to sculpt a 'Frozen Picture' in teams, that looked at 'the situation in L'Oréal as it is now', before creating a second picture that considered 'the ideal situation as we would like it to be'.  Having gone from examining the challenges they were facing right now towards a vision for the future, participants were then asked to create a third picture showing 'the image of transition, or transformation' - how do we get from where we are now to where we want to be?

This is a powerful technique that I often use in workshops, usually as a forerunner towards the deeper behavioural change work of Forum Theatre.  L'Oréal have found the workshops of immeasurable benefit in helping to visualise and, most importantly, physicalise ideas that were being discussed 'in theory' in other training workshops they were holding across the company.

At one of their leadership retreats, we were also asked to design a performance, that offered a light-hearted look at how the company could respond to nimble start ups that are able to get to market more quickly and easily than the larger cosmetic companies that dominate the market.  L'Oréal participants were asked to design their own response to the performance we developed, in short skits and plays that offered humorous solutions to these new competitors.

Earlier this year, I taught a course in Theatre for Social Change at Principia College, a liberal arts college on the banks of the Mississippi in Illinois.

It was the first time for me working in the US and was an exciting time, working with an enthusiastic bunch of 12 college students, in a project that also enabled us to try out our skills in a project with local youth at Alton High School.

I shared with the college students my experiences of working in China, the historical context of theatre for social change, exploring visionaries and practitioners such as Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal, Paulo Freire and eastern European playwrights such as Vaclav Havel whose writings inspired the beginnings of the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Eastern Bloc.

We did a 'deep dive' into the writings and practise of Augusto Boal and his famed Theatre of the Oppressed, which has been foundational to my own practice.  We looked at the Forum Theatre intervention and tested our learning on the college community in a Forum Theatre piece on the discrimination that international students experienced at the college.

Our work at Alton High School used techniques such as group character creation, hotseating and Forum Theatre too to explore issues that young people in the community face, issues such as drug abuse, homosexuality, single parent families, friendship issues and truancy.  Having never worked in the so-called 'developed world', it was fascinating to see the constraints we faced as theatre practitioners working in the community, receiving little or no support from the larger school community, whilst simultaneously developing a loyal following from the students for being able to address the issues they face in a 'real' way.  

Augusto Boal is a huge hero of mine and my experience in Illinois brought home to me echoes of Boal's own work when he was exiled from Brazilian dictatorship to Europe (to Paris indeed!) and discovered that, whilst people living in the so-called 'free world' did not experience political oppression, they were equally, if not more so, oppressed by the 'cops in the head', the mental limitations they imposed on themselves.

The 'This is our Story' project was a huge success and the young people excelled themselves in a Forum Theatre performance held at the local Jacoby Arts Centre with their parents and teachers.  Some of the feedback we had on the project included the following:

“Through the work we have done with Alton High School, I have found that theatre is an effective avenue for not only addressing issues essential to the community, but also to empower the actors and the community at large. In this process, I have grown as an actor, realized important values that I want to promote in my community, and discovered an amazing way to inspire others [through] open dialogue about critical issues that effect [sic] their communities, and the world.”

“Theatre will always be a light in a dark place, but after reading Boal’s work and seeing forum theatre in action, I think theatre for social change is a bonfire in a dark place. It’s dangerous and contentious and stirs in the minds of the people, but ultimately it’s [sic] light attracts and it’s [sic]  heat stirs fire within.”

You can listen to a radio interview here and read an article on the project here.

In his celebrated commencement speech at Stanford University, Steve Jobs, the legendary founder of Apple, relates a story where he dropped out of school and decided instead to take a course in calligraphy. Jobs acknowledges that this taking calligraphy had no obvious application in his learning at the time but, 10 years later, when he was designing the Mac, the design principles came back to him.  “It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle……in a way that science can’t capture".  The experience was transformational for Jobs and foundational in his understanding of typesetting and was to form the basis for how fonts were eventually developed on the Mac and had a wider impact on the PC industry as a whole.

When I was studying drama at university in the early 2000s, it was reported by the Institute of Directors that a drama degree offered the most transferable skills of any degree.  The degree I took involved assessment not only in traditional methods such as exams and essays, but also required me to develop a business plan for a theatre company, bring together a performance, produce a video, design and build sets, as well as run and manage a community programme with drug addicts.  In short, my success depended on my ability to build management and leadership skills, collaborate with others and build accounting, finance, marketing and administrative skills.  This all in addition to the conventional academic study of any higher education.

An insightful video by Pearson education talks about the role the kinds of transferable skills that drama brings.  As the video mentions, ‘Studying drama helps develop key business skills such as negotiation, leadership and collaboration.  It also boosts confidence, teamwork and creative thinking. Drama provides key transferable skills that would be useful in any industry’.  Katie Evans, an economist who worked on the 2013 report of the Economic Impact of the Arts and Culture, goes further on the role that the arts has more generally on the economy:  “Arts and culture contribute to the national economy in an enormous number of ways and have a significant impact.  In 2011, they [the arts] contributed £5.9 billion pounds to UK GDP and on average, between 2008 – 2011, they provided 111,000 full-time equivalent jobs.” 

I believe that my passion for and opportunity to study the arts, particularly drama, has had a direct impact on my career as an entrepreneur.  Having attended drama school from a young age, it was constantly drilled into us the competitive nature of the theatre and film industry and the need to differentiate oneself from the thousands of others likely auditioning with you.  We were encouraged to be persistent, to continue to develop ourselves as actors and performers and to be prepared to take on any job that would build ourselves as a diverse and multi-talented performer. 

These were certainly not lessons the average school student would receive but I have found that those skills served me well as I built my enterprise.  But there are other lessons I have learnt.  When a performer takes to the stage, it is extremely important that he or she develops the freedom that comes from fearlessness, to be able to respond to whatever experience is thrown him.  You can learn all the lines you have, rehearse umpteen times and have the best director in the world, but when it’s just you and the other actors up there in front of the audience, your skills of improvising and letting go of self are the only things that will carry you through. 

As Steve Jobs notes, it was his ability to ‘connect the dots’ with the different things he had learnt over his life that stood him in good stead to become the entrepreneur that he did.  And it was his artistic pursuits at a young age that contributed significantly to his success.    Irrespective of whether one becomes an actor or a calligrapher, the skills learnt in the arts provide a sound basis for our lives, whether one becomes an entrepreneur or an employee.  And they are critical to ensuring that we all become the fearless, creative and daring individuals that we are capable of being. 

We don’t often hear of examples of inspirational leadership coming from China.  Most media about the country today is focused on her economic growth and the wealth of entrepreneurs cashing in on the countries changing fortunes.  Worse still, there is a growing conversation within the country and without, on the breakdown of social values in the relentless pursuit of personal wealth.  Indeed, a few years ago, there was a case of a young migrant child who was run over by a car and failed to receive any help from passers by.  The video went viral and provoked a debate around the state of society in China today.

At Hua Dan, we are doing our bit to inspire the next generation of young people in China with values that will see them through the societal challenge that the country will face in the years to come.  UNESCO have themselves recognized the importance of education for sustainable living and talk about the values needed to be instilled in all children for the betterment of our world. 

I was inspired to read a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor on Liu Xiaobo, China’s famed dissident and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.  Liu has been a prominent human rights activist in China, was actively engaged in the formation of Charter 08 and has been detained in prison since 2009.  In the article, Liu is quoted as saying that he has no ‘personal enemies’, and maintains he has no hatred of the police officers and prison officials who detain him.  He goes on to say that ‘Hatred can rot away at a person’s intelligence and conscience. Enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation, incite cruel mortal struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a nation’s progress towards freedom and democracy.’ (Christian Science Monitor, 11th December 2014)

As the article points out, Liu is part of a long line of dissidents in history who have drawn strength during their trials through refusing to allow hatred into their thinking.

Given the political environment in China at present, it is not surprising that he has come up against resistance from the government.  But if one was to step aside from his politics for a moment, and purely to examine his own behaviour and conduct, it is encouraging to see someone who is transcending a material view of society in favour of a more visionary expectation of himself and his fellow man.  Liu is challenging the prevailing view that we are victims of the circumstances around us and, indeed, that humanity is capable of going beyond the restrictions that society would place on us.  Irrespective of the society we find ourselves living in, we have a choice as to how we are going to go ‘above and beyond’ the dominant way of thinking. 

This is, to me, what makes Liu so visionary, and China would do well to be proud of a son who can inspire the world with new ways of thinking about leadership, both leadership of self as well as of others.

The French have a slightly different way of using the word ‘global’ in comparison to how it is used in the English language. It refers not only to matters of the world, but also to a sense of completeness, of the whole, of the sum total of an idea. It seems to embrace the totality of what it means to be ‘of the world’.

This word was brought up in a conversation with a friend recently, when talking about what it means to be a ‘global citizen’.  It seems this term is over-used today so it was interesting to explore something deeper in our conversation, to describe the opportunities afforded to those who consider themselves to be ‘global’ and what that means for our world too. 

This is particularly important in the aftermath of the UK General Election, with the threat of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU now a realistic possibility.

I am a British citizen who has lived abroad for the last 15 years of my life, 7 of those years in China, now living in France.  This election was the last time that I will be allowed to vote in the UK if I continue to live abroad.  Although it could be argued that I should not necessarily have a right to vote on the government of a country that I don’t live in any longer, my desire to vote was based on the opportunity I had to make a stand for how I think Britain’s leadership in the world is still significant and I wanted to make at least a small contribution to how that leadership takes shape.

What has been difficult for me in this election is to find a way to vote that truly reflects the global world we live in.  Perhaps it is inevitable that voter priorities are inherently local but, from the vantage point of a UK citizen living abroad, especially one who has lived in China, my understanding of the need for Britain to ‘think globally’ is frustrated by the evident lack of coherent policies for engagement with China, for example, or even a lack of hubris in it’s relationship with the EU in light of the more global challenges we face.

Perhaps more critically, as someone who hopes to make a positive difference in the world is that, my absence from the UK for so long means that I would never be a credible candidate to stand for election, should I wish to make a change to the political landscape myself.  I have never been especially interested in running as a political candidate and, like many young people today, feel disillusioned with politics as a means to change the world.  But the way in which our political system works means that political office is restricted only to those with local affiliations, and not those who might have that more ‘global’ view.  To me, this is a big problem as the lines of global power are being re-drawn and we face unprecedented challenges to our security, well-being and economic stability.

I am a huge fan of Sandi Toksvig.  She is one of the funniest comediennes I know and I am an enthusiastic listener to BBC Radio 4’s The News Quiz, the weekly news programme she presents. 

Last week, Sandi announced that she was stepping down from her presenter role in order to found a new political party, The Women’s Equality Party.  In listening to a political debate a few days ago, involving female representatives from the major parties in the UK, I had questioned to myself why we didn’t have a women’s party.  So, I was thrilled to hear that many others were having the same idea and were bringing the idea to action!

In a recent interview on Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4, Sandi made the point that, if women make up over half the world’s population, it is right and appropriate that they should have representation that reflects their interests.  When asked why the party should not be called simply ‘The Equality Party’, without the ‘women’ part, Sandi replied that the lack of women’s equality per se is still such a big issue and that, critically, women’s equality would have a beneficial impact on many such other equality issues as disability, racial discrimination etc. 

I am hugely in support of what Sandi is doing, not least because it opens up political participation into broader ideas of how we should be represented at governance level.  In Britain, party politics have traditionally been represented according to attitudes to work, capital allocation, economics.  We have unquestioningly accepted that these should be the vectors through which we make decisions.  What I find with many of the thinking women I encounter is that their increased participation in leadership positions is encouraging a re-evaluation of the principles that guide our choices.   I believe it is no accident that there is now a wider awareness of discrimination issues, climate change, wealth gaps, corporate social responsibility etc than there used to be before women become more prominent in public life. So I think Ms Toksvig is onto something when she argues that women’s equality will naturally include more equality for all.

We often fantastise about whether the world would be different if it was run by women.  During the financial crisis, for example, there was an oft-quoted questioning of whether Lehman Brothers would have collapsed if it had been Lehman Sisters.  I’m not so sure that is the solution and I’m a firm believer that we need balance, rather than extremes, that a truly visionary world is one where men and women work together to bring out the very best in the expression of masculine and feminine qualities and capabilities.  Like many women (and men), I am disillusioned with the present political leadership, not just in the UK, but globally. But I hope very much that Ms Toksvig’s party will bring a more nuanced understanding of what our world truly needs and that she helps re-write the paradigms of our male-dominated world.

It’s not always easy to talk about spirituality in the realms of business and politics.  At best it can be seen as a harmless tool to make a harsh life that little bit more comfortable, at worse, it’s associations with religion and radical politics casts a shadow with more sinister connotations.

 

But it is heartening to see a growing willingness to talk about the role that spirituality plays in leadership and social change, and it’s role in transformation.

I’ve written before about the leaders that have been role models for me.  Leaders such as Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Aung San Suu Kyi and Mandela were those whose leadership did not only bring change to their countries and the causes they cared about but also left a lasting legacy on the world.  They demonstrated an understanding of the higher principles of equality, justice, compassion for all, universal principles for all time that went beyond the specifics of their individual work in establishing civil rights in America, freeing India of oppressive colonialism and ending apartheid in South Africa.  As Martin Luther King himself wrote: "A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God.” (King, Martin Luther (16 April 1963) “Letter from Birmingham Jail”). For him, and other leaders like him, it was imperative to bring to our human experience God’s vision for humanity

There is admirable work being done to encourage more women to study the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects and to pave the way for them to have careers in science and technology.  These efforts are laudable and vitally important as the world most certainly needs to have greater diversity within all spheres and women themselves need the utmost support to pursue careers in industries that have predominantly been the preserve of men.

 

But I wonder if we are also missing another important aspect of how we look at gender and the economy. 

We hear a lot that women still earn significantly less than men and I wonder whether this is also a symptom of the fact that women tend to be drawn to professions, or occupations, that currently pay little.  The arts, charitable work, teaching and nursing, caring for others – professions that have traditionally attracted more women - continue to be undervalued and, therefore, significantly underpaid. We have come to accept that this is simply the way the world works, that this type of work has little economic value.  We do not adequately challenge what it is that truly constitutes value, despite the oft-quoted fact that such work has a significant impact on the economy yet falls under the radar of productivity due to the fact that it is either unpaid or poorly paid.  To me, this is also at the detriment of how we encourage the skills and proclivities of women.

I work in the not-profit sector and started my own organization using theatre for social change.  There is and always has been much debate about the funds charitable organisations receive relative to the work they do and the contribution they make to the economy.   Typically, there is an open acceptance that non-profit work should not be paid as well as for-profit work and an unquestioning assumption that the arts in particular are an unnecessary luxury in today’s modern world. But I can’t help wonder whether this thinking is a result of the fact that it is women who have traditionally dominated this sector.

In the old days, charitable work was the preserve of women with wealthy husbands, who had little else to do but help the poor and needy as a way to give meaning to their lives.  As such, work in this sector has come to be synonomous with volunteering and, still today, the insinuation that such work is somehow less important and thus should not be highly paid continues.  

Women, however, continue to be drawn to working in this sector and yet there has been no radical questioning about how we need to value this type of work.  It seems that, in the discussion of encouraging more women to work in non-traditional sectors for them, such as science and technology, we also need a radical reassessment of what it is that constitutes value and take a broader view on encouraging both men and women to express themselves in all aspects of human creativity and productive work.

Fareed Zakaria recently wrote an article, calling for caution about the enthusiasm for STEM in the education system in America, at the expense of a broader education that encompasses the arts and humanities. He points out that America has built it’s success on innovation and creativity and that, as such, we ignore those ‘softer skills’ at our peril.  What is it going to take for politicians and economists to wake up to what truly constitutes value for our economy?

My brand of feminism has always believed that, whilst women should be enabled to pursue whatever it is in their hearts to do, whether that’s running for government, setting up a charity, developing patents in the scientific field, caring for others, running their own technology company, raising children or educating future generations, feminism should also include the capacity to ensure that ‘the feminine’ takes equal place to notions of the masculine in our world too.  It should never undermine or devalue the feminine qualities and skills that are so vital to a balanced world.

We thus then have a new challenge – to ensure that those professions that we have come to associate with women are raised up in equal measure at the same time as we encourage women to join traditionally ‘male’ professions.  This includes a radical reassessment of how we reward and value work in these professions too.  It is time to stop ignoring the elephant in the room of what it is that constitutes value in our world and challenge our thinking on true equality.

There was a beautiful film that came out a few years ago here in France.  Called ‘La Source des Femmes’ (The source of women), it told the story of a group of women in a small North African village who went on a sex strike after the men in the village refused to bring running water into the village.  For centuries, it had been the women’s job to go and collect water from the well at the top of a hill for cooking, which was grueling work in the heat and often dangerous work.  Some women even miscarried whilst doing it.  The film is the story of what happened when the women all united to withhold sex from their husbands until the men consented to their demands.

 

It is a touching and beautifully made film and, whilst the idea of a sex strike has controversial connotations in the feminist movement today, it makes some important points about notions of power and love.

 

Typically, love and power are seen to be polar opposites and, often, seem to be at open ends of the spectrum of male-female dialectics.  Love is seen as a passive, idealistic, ‘soft’, quality; power denotes force, energy and, often, aggression.  Invariably, power is seen as the preserve of men; love, of women.  Women are often discouraged or afraid to express power and love as a quality is often diminished and belittled as weak.

 

But what would it mean if we could look at the idea of love as a power?  Love as a transformative power that has a far greater force than our current notions of power that are so often displayed in our world.

 

Power, considering it’s Latin root, posse, means ‘ to be able’.  It expresses a sense of capability, of an enabling force, possibility, even.  The word ‘potential’ is a derivative of the word power and suggests a latent force that is in the process of being uncovered. 

 

Could it be that love is that latent force – an untapped resource - that will bring true strength, dominion and leadership to this world?  And one that is not limited by climate change, conflict or global instability?

 

Much is spoken of about women’s capacity to bring a more humane approach to world issues, and the importance of encouraging women’s leadership in the public sphere.  This is crucial and invaluable work.  But, we all know that love is not the exclusive preserve of women, any less than power that of men.  Indeed, it is the qualities of both the masculine and feminine that, when brought together, create a force more ‘powerful’ than anything we have yet to see.

 

The 19th century spiritual thinker and pioneer, Mary Baker Eddy, said: ‘The unity of masculine and feminine constitutes completeness.’

 

As the film so beautifully demonstrates, when women and men work together, each expressing the highest ideas of love and power, extraordinary things can happen.