Simon Western, founder of the Eco-Leadership Institute, joins host Lars Peter Nissen, to explore how to bring some soul into the humanitarian space as they know it. And how the “helpless helping” tendency currently plagues it. Simon draws on his experience from psychiatric nursing to corporate leadership, and explains how his eco-leadership model - rooted in ecosystemic thinking and mutualism - could re-enchant individuals and organisations, helping to break free from outdated, bureaucratic structures.

Simon argues that real transformation won’t come from top-down reforms but from the fringes - through leadership that disrupts and dismantles the bloated machinery from the edge. You’ll leave questioning the systems you work within and inspired by the potential of a more connected and dynamic energy. He inspires us to get to work, all of us, to push, alone but collectively, from the edges of our individual realities. Tune in for more insights and check out Simon’s podcast Edgy Ideas, as well as his blog on Helpless Helping.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (0:45 - 1:50)

Simon Western is the founder and the CEO of the Eco Leadership Institute and Simon has a very sophisticated and interesting way of thinking about leadership, how we can empower individuals, how we can re-enchant organizations and change the way we work bit by bit. In our conversation we talk about a piece of art that inspired Simon to write a blog post that we discuss and you can find a link in the show notes to that blog. I also would like to encourage you to check out Simon's podcast called Edgy Ideas, you will find the link again in the show notes, it's really worth a listen. As always, fantastic if you have time to review the show, share it around with others, make some noise on social media, but the most important thing is enjoy the conversation. Simon Western, welcome to Trumanitarian.

[Simon Western] (1:50 - 1:51)

Hello Lars, nice to be here.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (1:52 - 2:10)

I'm really happy we managed to get this conversation going. You're the founder and the CEO of the Eco Leadership Institute and I really look forward to learning more about that. But before we dive into the discussion of Eco Leadership, it would be great if you could tell us a bit about your background.

[Simon Western] (2:10 - 4:42)

It was a massive shift for me, but I really wanted to understand what was going on in the private sector and in the corporate sector. So I did a lot of work there. I set up their coaching diploma, postgraduate coaching diploma. And then I went to work on my own and I've been an author of books on leadership. And I'm coaching, always taking a critical view. So it's a critical perspective is what I'm known for. Trying to understand what goes on beneath the surface in organisations. So that's my journey.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (4:42 - 5:47)

That is such a rich and diverse story you have. And to be honest, I had no idea that most of your experience is from the UK. We've met on the margins of meetings at Save the Children and at the Humanitarian Exchange Conference earlier this year. And I just sort of assumed that your background was in international humanitarian assistance, but actually it's not at all. Now, as a point of departure for our conversation, I'd like to start with a blog post you wrote. It's called Helpless Helping. And it is based on a piece of art, a photography, where you see a woman in a raincoat pouring water on her own head. While standing next to a burning chair, and she says something along the lines, I swear I'm helping. So the idea is that rather than actually putting out the fire, she's basically watering herself. And it'd be lovely to hear your reflections on what that photo made you think and how that links to your thinking around eco-leadership.

[Simon Western] (5:48 - 8:25)

Yeah, so this picture was in a coffee shop I go to. And every time I looked at it, it captured me like it was humorous. It was funny. And it really challenged me. It unsettled me. It's funny you mentioned it because it's actually hanging in my office in front of me now. I bought it because it had such a powerful impact on me, and I wanted to support her work. But the picture really, you know, I've been a therapist. And last two or three years, I've been working in the humanitarian sector. And all my work around my life really has been around people, helping people, caring professions, you know, nursing and things. And so often I've seen this kind of helpless helping where people are motivated to help for different reasons. And yet they're not really helping. They're pouring the water over their own heads. You know, they perform helping, but they're not really helping. And it kind of raised questions for me. And I started to think about kind of what that was, you know. And sometimes it's about self-interest. Sometimes it's people who like to be seen to be doing good. You know, so sometimes it's like greenwashing. You know, you have this idea of greenwashing in corporations. So they like to kind of tell their customers they're doing great work when really they're just kind of covering stuff over. So sometimes it's kind of people really do it knowingly. You know, it's a self-interested knowing. But it's not always like that. And I think in the humanitarian sector, you see a lot of it. And in the humanitarian sector, it's an unconscious repression. People come to humanitarianism because they want to help.

You know, this is what they say. I joined because I really wanted to help. You know, I want to kind of alleviate suffering. That's why I'm here for. So there's a conscious desire to help. But then there's an unconscious block to helping. Where either we don't do it because we want to satisfy our own needs. And it's unconscious because people want to defend themselves. They want to defend their identities as good people. Like, I'm a good person, so therefore I'm doing good. And they can't face a reality that actually a lot of the work they're doing is not helping. And this is what I see a lot in the humanitarian sector. And it's, yeah, I see a great deal of it. And, you know, people who are, you know, they think of themselves as good people. They identify with suffering others. And yet they'll keep a bureaucratic system going, or they'll block positive change, or there'll be resistance to change. And that's kind of, you know, what the picture kind of provoked in me, really.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (8:26 - 8:42)

What you say resonates really deeply with me, Simon. Apart from one thing where I have to admit, I sort of disagree with you. I don't think it is unconscious. I think there's quite a high degree of understanding of what the state of play is in the sector.

[Simon Western] (8:43 - 9:25)

I would say that I talk about performative helping. So I think sometimes it is conscious and sometimes it is unconscious. I mean, if you study psychoanalysis and you work deeply with people, what you find is that, you know, we all have an identity. And we will defend our identity with everything. It's like, you know, if you attack my identity, like, you know, you're attacking me and I'm over. So I'm going to defend that with everything. And I'm a good humanitarian. You know, I work for this organisation. I'm a good humanitarian. So to actually acknowledge that what you're doing is futile or against the help is actually too painful. So some of it is buried. Some of it is conscious and some of it is unconscious.

OK, I really agree with that. And I've also seen those very strong reactions that come up when you try to say that I don't think that what we're doing here is good. And you can see people really saying or feeling that if you're saying this is not good, then you're saying I'm not good and I am a good person. So I've seen those reactions again and again. And so it's not that I don't agree with that being an issue that we have in the sector. But at the same time, when I think about the discussions we had at Humanitarian Exchange and how critical the discourse was mixed in with new ideas and positivity about new possibilities and so on, but still highly critical, I think it is very hard to maintain that we are just happy, naive, do-gooders who trot around feeling like we're doing good in the world. We have to take responsibility for a situation that is problematic and that is very well lit.

Sure, but I think if you want, like I wrote a book chapter recently on Salvation Aid, like really digging deep about, because you can throw words out like colonialism, paternalism, and I agree absolutely, no argument that this is still throughout the whole sector. But if you really want to change that, you have to look at the underlying things which keep it in place. And one of the underlying things is this unconscious way of defending ourselves. So we know it's bad. Yeah, there's a lot of rhetoric around, yeah, we must move to localization. We must kind of get rid of the global north power, et cetera. And yet it continues. And yet, you know, so there's a rhetoric and then there's these defense mechanisms which stop us driving change.

Great. And I think it is a perfect segue to the discussion of eco-leadership. So please tell us, what is eco-leadership all about?

Yeah, so to try and do it briefly, I mean, eco-leadership came from research, PhD research. I tried to study leadership over the last century from the West, English language books I was reading. And I did this piece of research and it revealed four discourses of leadership. So it revealed the industrialization process and factories and how leadership was in those days. Like my first factory I worked in is very much controller leadership. So I had this idea of controller leadership and controller leadership came from the factory, close supervision, breaking kind of work down into component parts, very machine thinking, very focused on efficiency. And you see a lot of that in the sector. You see kind of a lot of that, that kind of like, we must be efficient, we must kind of get the data. And so you see controller and you need some of that. So that's like, you need some of it. Too much of it is very dehumanizing. Too much of it kind of is problematic. It's actually returned through, it went into demise. People kind of wanted to humanize workplaces more and go towards the next phase, which was therapist leadership. But it's come back through algorithmic management. It's come back through data centers. It's come back through control by numbers. So computerization has brought controller leadership right back into the center of things again. So that was the first phase. And it's kind of still with us. It can be useful and it's needed in some areas. We need to control our resources. We need to be efficient. Too much of it is really kind of dehumanizing. The second phase is therapist leadership. And therapist leadership was this sort of 1960s shift towards individualism, towards personal growth, towards the countercultural challenges to authoritarianism. And therapist leadership in the workplace shows up as happy workers or more productive workers. So we have managers who get trained in people skills, conflict resolution, motivation skills, psychometrics. And you get a lot of that in the humanitarian center. And it's needed. You need good quality people skills. However, too much of that is you don't think strategically. You don't think big picture. You just think about individuals and small groups. And it can create dependency cultures. Because if you're like a really nice leader, nice manager, it can be a bit parental. And you get dependent followers. It can be a bit parent-child dynamics. So that's the second phase I found. And that's still powerful with us. Again, necessary, but too much of it. And there's problematics. The third phase I talked about was messiah leadership. And this was in the 1980s when leadership went through the roof and you had transformational leadership everywhere. And everyone wanted charismatic leaders. And CEO salaries went through the roof. And the idea was that you get a charismatic leader who set out a vision for the organization. And then you get a strong culture following that vision. And everyone would align. You didn't need to motivate people because they were buying in with their souls. They believed in what they were doing. And you get some of that. And it's actually people looking for the best chief executive to lead. You get your David Miller bands to try and lead with some sort of vision. So we get some of that. But it's not that big in the sector. And then I was thinking about what was happening at the turn of the century. What's the next phase for leadership? And I came up with eco-leadership. People were becoming more resonant with ideas of ecosystems, the ecology, the environment. This was becoming more manifested. We had to go to Tunberg. We had the environmental movement. And there was this shift as people started to think about complexity, about systems thinking. So there's this new discourse arriving. And my work in the last 10, 15 years has been to try and theorize this and put this into practice. Because there's a lot of talk around systems thinking and complexity thinking. But it's very abstract. It's kind of very abstract and hard to apply. So my work has been really to think about how we can think more ecosystemically, to think about less vertical, less hierarchical ways of thinking, to decentralize leadership, to think about how power gets distributed throughout organizations. And I work in, it's interesting because I get phone calls from car manufacturers, global car manufacturers, from high tech companies, from health systems. And the humanitarian system called me up and said, Simon, we're really interested in this eco-leadership. We've been reading your books, come along. So there is a big shift. People realize that we have to think more about ecosystems and they don't quite know how to do it. And that's kind of the fundamentals of the work.

That's a really clear and great way of describing the sort of changes in thinking around leadership over the past decades. And I find it's really interesting to think through the combination of the Messiah school of thought with that algorithmic enslavement that we almost are seeing now, what happens when you combine the two. That's quite a scary thought. And I think it's very natural that the counterpoint to that thinking is something much more organic, self-organizing, empowering for the individual. So how does it actually play out? When you rock up at Save the Children and start talking about eco-leadership in an industry where, let's be honest, there's a good deal of hamster wheels and a lot of risk matrices and a lot of systems that don't necessarily empower the individual, what actually happens when you introduce the eco-leadership thought?

Then what happens is you get a lot of good energy around it and you get a lot of excitement and people kind of, it speaks to their condition. They know this is kind of a direction of travel and that follows by a lot of resistance. You get kind of like, you hit a wall of resistance. But let me say something. So eco-leadership, one of the beauties of it, and I worked in the NHS, the huge health system in the UK, which is very bureaucratic, very top-down, very problematic. And I was getting very frustrated and people were talking about systems change, about the whole system needing changing, but nothing changing. And it's similar in a humanitarian, big INGOs, like, you know, this big machinery, you know, you're not going to change it. But my theories of eco-leadership are that I study social movements, I study how change happens in society and change comes from the edge. So I talk about leadership from the edge. So you're doing two things at once. One, you're trying to convince people in senior positions that they need to shift things, but actually you're not waiting for that to happen. You're creating change from the edge. You're creating leaders from the edge. You're distributing leadership. We run lots of programs at the edge. We're educating people. And what I was finding, Lars, was so interesting. I went to Zimbabwe. I did some field trips to look at what's happening on the Polish-Ukraine border. I looked at Zimbabwe, went to Tanzania, went to Kenya. And leaders working in the field, people working kind of at the edge, got this straight away. Yeah, this is it. This is kind of what we do. This is what we do, actually. We have to think about kind of where we get resources in the ecosystems to survive. We have to work more mutually with other people and more collaboratively to get by. So they were much more kind of not only interested, but engaged in this. And the big machinery is where the problems kind of resist it.

200%. Everything you just said totally tallies with my experience from Afghanistan, from Zimbabwe. That's what I've seen. I've seen the fantastic work done by the colleagues in the field. I have also seen how things get gradually more and more strange as you move from the field to capitals, to the global level, where sometimes very few things make sense. And so my question to you is, nibbling around the edges, talking to people in the field who already know how to work and what actually works in that context, how is that transformative?

Well, one is they need support. And I think we can romanticize it too much. So local actors have challenges as well. Power games are played. So you can actually support people in doing what they do better. And you can learn from them. I mean, one thing about ecolegy is learning and spreading best practice. So you get an excellent NGO in the Polish-Ukraine border, and you share their message with someone in Zimbabwe, and vice versa. So you're building ecosystems of change. The idea is that we build ecosystems of change. So you're thinking from the edge, but social change movements start with activists and things spread. And you've described a lot of the discontent in the system already. But that discontent becomes kind of quite binary and blaming and finger pointing. And in Psychonauts, we have a phrase, people take pleasure in their displeasure. So people in the sector, they're disenchanted, but they actually, they're quite stuck in sort of this blame culture. So ecosystems kind of break away the binary of the vertical versus the horizontal. It says, you know, power exists everywhere. How can we kind of find a space to kind of move in that?

Where in that ecosystem will change start to take place? Let's kind of look at that node of change and let's spread it.

Yeah, exactly. And so where do you see those pressure points?

So the pressure, I mean, I'm not claiming to be any kind of expert in the field. I've been working in the field for a couple of years. What I bring is fresh perspectives from diverse places. But the pressure points I see in the system are, I see it crumbling. I mean, the pressure points, the levers for change are, you know, the final, you know, everybody talks about, you know, the finance challenges as there's kind of cuts being made, that there's restructures and stuff, you know, that there's a crumbling system. There's an empire, which is crumbling. The humanitarian system is an empire kind of under pressure, which gives you opportunities. You know, the question is, do you try and like just stabilize what's there or do you use those opportunities to drive change? But what you have to do, I think, and what's missing is a kind of radical revisioning of what that looks like. So people say, you know, get decolonized, that's okay, but what in place? And, you know, I've written a short book on eco-mutualism, which is like, I'm saying, you have to think more ecosystemically and people aren't thinking ecosystemically and you have to kind of put mutualism at the heart of this work. And this is not kind of massively new, but these two things are powerful anchors to drive change.

I can feel myself getting so enthusiastic hearing you describe this. It resonates so deeply with me. And then at the same time, Simon, I have this little voice in the back of my head that says, yeah, but if you think about Ukraine in February 22, I know some of the people who very early on went in and started working with Ukrainian civil society, striking up excellent ideas among partnerships, really finding powerful alliances and getting ready to really make a difference. And then the lawyers show up with 23 pages MOU that needs to be signed and three months later, nothing has happened. And I get so angry and I get so frustrated. And so I hear what you're saying around the crumbling empire or the profound crisis we're in. And I think that if you look at the funding situation the sector is in right now, maybe that will drive some more change. But I don't see anybody who's able to break the chokehold that risk management has on the whole system.

No, and it's hugely problematic, but I think we have to be aware about how fast things can change. So we can become very disillusioned and we can become very disenchanted. It does look like a kind of machinery which will never change and it's impossible. And sometimes it does feel like that for sure. But actually, I mean, my experience of working in big corporations and big public sector organizations and NGOs is just how quickly things can change and how precarious things are actually. And we need to have some ideas and some ways of working to move that process forward and be ready for when things do start crumbling.

That again resonates quite deeply with me. And I also think that there probably will be a tipping point that we don't see coming, but suddenly things open up and a lot of things are possible that we couldn't do last Tuesday. I'm just not sure that today's incumbents, that the big humanitarian organizations can survive that transformation. I'm not sure that they can really fundamentally change who they are and how they operate because the business model we currently have is so deeply ingrained in them.

No, maybe not. But this is why we do leadership from the edge. This is why we build ecosystems of resistance, ecosystems of resilience. If you start thinking in this way, this is the future. We live in what I call a precarious independent world. The poly crisis, we're going to be increasingly, precarity is going to be increasingly part of kind of everyday's life. Stability is not likely to happen in our lifetime or beyond that. So we have to adapt to a kind of precarious world. Now, that means really understanding how we mobilize our ecosystems, how we nurture our ecosystems, how we kind of work differently. And at the moment we're, I mean, one of the big critiques I have is we're very stuck and we don't realize this is, this helped us help the thing really. We're stuck in the modernist way of thinking. Absolutely kind of trapped in this modernist way of thinking. Like, you know, people, they talk about change and then they say we must be more efficient. They use exactly the same words, efficiency, growth, you know, linear thinking. Like, you know, they don't, they can't think outside that modernist box. And we have to learn to think outside that modernist box, which is more holistic, more systemic, more kind of engaged, more adaptive.

I really agree with that. And I think that when you deal with ecosystems, you actually don't really know where the change will come from. You don't know exactly how it will behave.

You can stock the pond with certain fish and see how they behave. You can expect that maybe some things will happen down the line, but it's not predictable in that sense. And so from that perspective, where is it that you have hope? Where is it you see changes and things growing and think, yeah, this is where it'll come from. This is where maybe in a couple of years time, we will see some real change.

Well, the energy I see at places like, you know, I've been in conversation with colleagues in India. And, you know, where there's like huge, and in Zimbabwe the same, there was huge kind of cuts, you know, central cuts. Like, you know, suddenly, you know, you got to rethink what you're doing. And, you know, you got 50% of the funds. And they then catch on to kind of the work I'm doing. And we get into dialogues. And they are really thinking about local resources, about ecosystems, also about global ecosystems, where they can find. I mean, I think people don't understand that within ecosystems, if you start looking ecosystemically around you, there's huge resources to avail, that there's huge potential. Like the lack of, it drives me nuts, how kind of like you meet these great people kind of everywhere, and they're just frustrated because their potential isn't being used. So when you start mobilizing that potential, and that's where I see people in Zimbabwe, in India, making changes, adapting to kind of situations, saying, okay, we're not going to deliver it anymore. The partners we used to kind of support, then they can deliver. And you can start seeing these shifts, and you start seeing these energies, and they're catching on to, you know, the language I use is one way of calling it, there's other languages, you know. So that's where I see the energy for change happening.

Great, and I also see those glimmers of hope in a lot of the people I meet, and that is very positive. At the same time, when you look at the world today, not just the humanitarian sector, but I would say global governance as such, it's quite clear that we have a profound crisis. Just look at the response to climate change. And so I think my question is, in those glimmers of hope, do you see anything building up, scaling and connecting with global governance, and being able to influence it in a way that is impactful?

Well, I think these questions of ecosystems are very political. And I don't think power is talked about enough, you know, so like in a lot of systemic, like one of my critiques of systems thinking and complexity thinking is, is it really doesn't address power questions and political questions and the political economy. So the political crisis around us, the pressures around us, the shift to a lot of populist nationalism, all these shifts around us. The question for me is like, where does humanitarianism sit within that, within that ecosystem? And that's one of the things it doesn't, which needs questioning as well. So I can talk about leadership from the edge, but also that there's this global ecosystem taking place, there's political shifts, and humanitarianism has lost its way. It doesn't quite know what it is anymore. You know, it's gone through these different phases and, you know, I've mapped those out, other people have mapped those out. And the question now I'm asking around and not getting some great answers is, you know, what is humanitarian for and how does it kind of exist in this new kind of emerging ecosystem? And what does it want for itself in a way?

And since you are the guest on the show, let me ask you, Simon, where does the humanitarian project fit into global governance today?

I, a part of being an eco-leader is not to kind of give a top-down answer. So being a white bloke sat in Ireland, I wouldn't like to kind of pretend that I have that answer. But I think asking the question is important.

For me, I'm probably quite conservative when it comes to this. I think part of the problem we have today is that we have tried to do things we're not very good at. And I think we need to go back to basics. At its essence, humanitarian action is about the belief that every single human life has unique value, and that that life and the dignity of every human must be protected. And then humanitarian action, we are the people who try to help populations who have fallen through the crack and who are struggling to survive and who cannot live with dignity because their basic rights are not being respected. And that's it. That's what we do. And we will push whatever button we can reach. We'll build coalitions of the willing and the able to help those people. That's our job. And then there's a whole bunch of things we're not very good at. And we should stay away from that, not in the sense that we don't want to touch it, because, of course, the whole ecosystem approach to things is exactly about understanding yourself in relation to others. But in order to do that, you also have to know what you're not. And if you really, if you are a desperate measure to help people who are in desperate situations, that is what you do. And then the big money for climate change adaptation or whatever, it goes somewhere else. The humanitarian modality is not a very sophisticated one. We should be honest about that and humble about that and focus on what we are good at.

And I would add to that that that's the impetus and that's a core kind of ethos of what we're about, for sure. But we have to think about this help is helping at the same time. So us going to help other people, again, very quickly, we become paternalistic, we become salvationist. So for me, we always have to stick this word mutualism in like, no, if I go over there and I start kind of help showing them my expertise because they're not as wise as me, then then we're in trouble again. So we have to always, always think, I mean, I, I, I trace salvation aid. And I, I looked at, you know, empathy is kind of what you're talking about. Empathizing with the suffering. Yeah, there is kind of the impetus for this. But when it comes in, it kind of shifts into compassion and compassion. Then suddenly can be twisted into paternalism stuff. So instead of compassion, we have to think about mutualism. We have to think about what does actually kind of help and what doesn't help, you know. How much am I doing this myself? How much am I doing it for the other? And those questions have to become at that point.

I agree with that 200 percent. 200 percent. And I think that a lot of the field workers you meet in, I fully agree with that. And I think that a lot of the solid field workers you meet operate like that. They understand this. And that is the way they show up.

Sure, I agree.

And then enter the big money and all of the risk management and the planning systems and the rigidity. And then we end up in the situation we're in today. And I've been trying to think a lot about how to change this. How can we, what new institutional expressions could help alleviate these tendencies? And I more or less end up where you just were every single time. And so my answer today probably is we need a WhatsApp group of sensible people. And that's about the most sophisticated platform we can operate on. The minute you start channeling resources to it or building some kind of secretariat or whatever, I deeply worry that we end up in the same place we are today.

I mean, there are innovations, you know, like FinTech has been interesting, hasn't it? You know, they're like direct payments from cash and things. So, you know, where you put money directly into recipients, kind of hands rather than going through middle people or delivering aid. So I think that there are examples of sort of decentralized direct aid, which are interesting.

Absolutely. I mean, cash distribution is a massive innovation and it has improved the assistance in many, many countries. Two comments or two concerns. One, I am concerned about the concentration of power that comes along with the economies of scale that the technology brings. It simply makes sense to push a lot of money through one pipeline and having two doesn't make sense. So you concentrate a lot of power in a few actors' hands.

And secondly, I think it's been fascinating to see how we, the middle man, have come up with all sorts of concepts to justify our input, cash for education, cash for protection, cash for work, which, by the way, is just called a job, right? It's quite grotesque sometimes, the concept that we come up with to justify our own existence.

Yeah, I mean, I come back to sort of you don't kind of have top-down answers, but you have ethos and principles. So you ask every time, is this helping the ecosystem be more resilient? Is this going to support the ecosystem in the future as well as just in the present? Are we applying mutualistic ideas here? If you ask these questions while you're delivering aid or while you're thinking about what the idea of humanitarian is, it guides your practice. And there's not any one way. And I don't think, I mean, one thing I say quite controversially, I think, is that I wonder whether we need to shift from human rights to kind of human agency, because who decides on human rights? But this idea of putting people, people's agency, how can we increase their decision-making over their own lives? Rather than us telling them that this is the right and this is the wrong. I think that needs dialogue as well and it needs questioning.

Interesting, because I immediately think about human rights as the key enabler for agency, if your basic rights are not respected whereas your agency. So I don't necessarily see it as a zero-sum game.

Yeah, maybe. I worry about the concerns of the liberal democracies imposing what they think the rights are, because these things get distorted and they get looked at through a lens, and funding goes to one place, not another, and countries get withheld funding because of their lack of rights. So I think there's some space for rethinking that. I mean, how do we decouple that from global north liberal kind of politics, basically?

What I really admire and appreciate about your thinking is that you're obviously not jaded or have lost hope at all.

No, I think our mission, I mean, I think the mission in the humanitarian sector and wider, like the Ecolegio Institute, our mission is about re-enchanting organizations. And I think there's a lot of disenchantment. I think there's some wonderful people in the humanitarian sector. There's some amazing potential. And I do think we need to re-enchant that. And the human potential is there. And beyond that, our connectivity to the environment. I mean, the Ecolegio idea is very much about interdependency with the environment, with non-humans as well as humans to think more in a connected way. But before we do anything, we have to re-enchant people because when you're burnt out, when you're frustrated, when you're kind of just hit a wall. So this is like small changes lead to big changes. And things do change very quickly sometimes. So that's where my hope is.

What's the best example you've seen of a re-enchanted organization?

I try not to give like utopian examples. I mean, like in the commercial world, you get Patagonia, an organization where it treats its workers in a very good way. They think about the environment. So they combine this view. So there's very good examples of practice. But I mean, what I say is that if you actually look through a different lens, if you look at leadership in an organization through a different lens and just looking for the CEO and the chief executive and waiting for them to drive change. Leadership's happening everywhere in the ecosystem. People are taking small acts of leadership everywhere. You know, it's just not noticed or it's not accounted for. It's not given credit. I go to an organization and I look for leadership in a distributed way. I look for informal leadership as well as formal leadership. And this is what keeps organizations going. And you see it everywhere. So you see this, the things I'm talking about aren't naive. They're everywhere. This is how organizations run anyway. We need to amplify the good practice. We need to support the good practice. And that's where I really see kind of the potential for change because it's actually there already. It's just immobilizing it. It's how do we mobilize it? How do we kind of connect it to other good practice?

I think that re-enchantment must begin with a new story about ourselves. Who are we actually? And how do we describe what we're doing? Are we the good people doing good deeds and saving those poor people out there in the world? Or what are we? How do we construct a narrative that is really empowering for us as individuals, for us as collectives, as colleagues, so that we can have that re-enchantment?

No, that's essential. The Ecclesiastical Institute and the Humanitarian Leadership Academy are partnering with Pledge for Change at the moment. And one of their pledges is authentic storytelling. Exactly what you said, how do we tell these stories in a much better way and in a much more authentic way and narrate them? And there does need to be a lot of work on that.

So what's next for you, Simon? You have quite a lot of activities going. But what really excites you for the next couple of years?

I'm going to really focus on re-enchanting organizations. I'm running a program in Spain in November. It's called The Soul at Work. So what I like to do is bring people together. So bringing people from different sectors with different experiences. I'm running a course at the moment and we have people on the course from Iran, from USA, from Puerto Rico. I love this kind of learning from other people, learning from each other. So the focus of my work is going to be on re-enchanting organizations. We're going to be looking at The Soul at Work. I'm going to do hopefully more writing. I've got a new book coming out next year. Thinking about entanglements, weaving our futures. So I'm going to put a lot of my energies into this. I need to re-enchant my own soul. It can be hard working in these organizations.

I need to sort of write and I need to meet some other good people. And that inspires me. And then hopefully I can inspire them as well.

Now, we didn't discuss this before we started, Simon. So it's slightly unfair. But you're going to be our guinea pig today. Because I know that at the end of each of your podcast episodes on Edgy Ideas, you ask your guests the same question. And would you mind just telling us what that question is?

Yeah, I ask people what it means for them to live a good life and to create a good society.

And what would your answer be?

To live a good life has been my life's mission really to try and understand that question. So I think maintaining curiosity and to rediscover the soul is important to be connected not only to other humans, but to nature, to the environment. You know, to live a good life is to be part of a community, to be part of a planet. It's not an isolated thing. So for me, it's about being connected and about finding where your soul fits with those around you, both human and non-human. And to create a good society is a similar thing, really, that connectedness, that interdependence from that. In psychoanalysis, we talk about putting your symptom to work for yourself and for society. So your symptom can be whatever strength you have or whatever dysfunction you have. But you don't just try and cure or make it. We're all unique individuals and we all have something very special, some essence of ourselves. And how do we put that to work for ourselves so we live a good life, but also for society to make a difference?

That's a beautiful answer, Simon. And the reason I told you that you are a guinea pig is that my two producers, Ila and Rigmor, have been telling me, you know, Simon, he does this thing at the end of his show and he thinks, he asked this question and it's so cool and we must do the same thing we must have some kind of thing we do at the end of the show. And so we finally came up with this idea. We would like you, as the first of our guests, to give us a prediction. Tell us of a consequential event that you predict will happen within the next six months. And then what we'll do is that in six months time, we will give you a call back and we will play you back your prediction and then we will talk about whether that happened or not. And see where that takes us. So do you have a prediction for us?

Wow. What will happen in the next six months? Well, there's an American election coming up. So there's gonna be a change of president. That's a certainty. What direction that changes, I think will have a massive impact on the world. So it's a 50-50 call at the moment. I'm concerned that that could go the wrong way, could go Trumpian. And then I think that will have a very negative impact. Hopefully, if it goes the Harris way, it will create a bit more stability. I'm going to predict that the wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine start to not end, but move towards some resolution. That's my hopeful prediction.

That is an excellent, bold and hopeful prediction. And we'll call you back in six months time to see whether you were right. Simon, thank you so much for coming on True Monetarian.

I really enjoyed this conversation and to all the listeners, I'd like to recommend that you check out Simon's podcast, Edgy Ideas. It is a very, very interesting show. Thank you.

Really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks.