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Provoke the Stifling 6

HISTORY IS THE LONG AND TRAGIC STORY OF THE FACT THAT PRIVILEGED GROUPS SELDOM GIVE UP THEIR PRIVILEGES VOLUNTARILY.

Martin Luther King

“Letter from Birmingham Jail”

I GIVE YOU THIS ONE RULE OF CONDUCT. DO WHAT YOU WILL,

BUT SPEAK OUT ALWAYS. BE SHUNNED, BE HATED, BE RIDICULED,

BE SCARED, BE IN DOUBT, BUT DON’T BE GAGGED. THE TIME OF TRIAL

IS ALWAYS. NOW IS THE APPOINTED TIME.

John Jay Chapman

Commencement address, Hobart College, 1900

AT TIMES, people face circumstances they feel compelled to challenge. They direct themselves to attack intensely the way things are because the sum of those things, or one aspect they find particularly appalling, is destroying human possibilities.

This work constitutes a special kind of calling, one that takes courage in the face of organized adversity. If evocateurs evoke potential and capability, then those who challenge the injustice of a system, provoking its members to abandon the current design, must be named provocateurs. While many people bravely endure and personally triumph over injustice, fewer devote themselves to eliminating the injustice for themselves, for others, and for future generations. This is the calling of the provocateur.

Most of us have the need and the opportunity to be a provocateur at some stage or time in our lives. We know that something isn’t right and needs to be addressed. In business settings, the stifling of the human spirit continues even though we have sponsored three decades of new business practices in participation and teaming that were aimed at enlivening the spirit. This kind of nonprogress leads strategy guru Gary Hamel to write:

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Good provoking of the corporate status quo, wouldn’t you say? Hamel captures our disgust at the shallowness of our change efforts.

(Hamel’s earlier work on strategy concentrated on the systems that sustain innovation, but as he looked at business innovation more carefully it appears he shifted to the realization that individuals answering their call to buck complacency, provocateurs all, were more important than any system a business can put in place to ensure innovation.)

This unique kind of call, an inbred antagonism for the status quo, raises important questions:

• How do provocateurs effectively carry out their role?
• What pitfalls do provocateurs need to avoid in living out this difficult calling?
• How can you sponsor other provocateurs when you know your time for this type of call is past?

BATTLES FOUGHT

The stifling practices provocateurs battle happen everywhere, throughout all human history, and in every human endeavor, a few of which I list in the following paragraphs. What they have in common is that the stifling constitutes a moral if not legal injustice that blocks human potential and freedom.

A brief description of several provocateurs will remind us of how important this calling is for human advancement.

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THE ARTS

In the early twentieth century artists like Igor Stravinsky and James Joyce provoked the established world of form and what was critically acceptable as art. They created art forms that mirrored the dissonance of modern life and were initially vilified, and eventually praised, for the freedom of expression their work embodied. Isadora Duncan did for dance what they did for music and literature.

POLITICS AND GOVERNANCE

The suffragettes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries battled the second-class status of women. Later, in the twentieth century, Nelson Mandela provoked the government of oppression so entrenched in South Africa that it would keep him imprisoned on an island for twenty-seven years. I wonder what our present-day equivalent to women not having basic rights is, what condition people in the twenty-second century will look back on with horror and disbelief.

BUSINESS

There are countless stories of intrapreneurs, the term coined by consultant and author Gifford Pinchot for innovators in companies who provoke their own management to create anew. Some succeed and their companies gain, but many of these provocateurs lose their employment or leave it in frustration because the soil is too barren for new ideas to take root. Then, they often innovate in another company, or one started by themselves, where they can cultivate the soil to sprout and grow ideas into revenue streams.

SCIENCE

Margaret Mead, early in her career in the 1930s, provoked the field of anthropology to become valuable to the general reading public. She turned science and the pursuit of anthropological truth into popular discussion of cultures and the different ways of being human.

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EDUCATION

Maria Montessori left traditional education with its industrial models of turning out children who can pass tests but can’t think for themselves. She provoked the educational system to use curriculum designs based on the individual child’s gifts for learning as they emerge.

EVERYDAY LIFE

At work, someone on the team won’t let her team take a shortcut with a process because it will be at the expense of the customer.

At home, the teenager provokes the rest of the family into discussing how they want to spend their time over the holidays. Do they want to spend all their time shopping for the other members, or do they want to give back to the community in some meaningful way by devoting time to the less fortunate?

A mother initiates a discussion on how to recycle bottles and cans, so the family members have to confront ecological principles and what they do every day to contribute to wastefulness.

I witnessed an everyday provocateur moment a few years ago. A corporate manager, who had begun exploring her spiritual side, decided that she wanted to go to a Buddhist monastery and meditate for a month. Well, she had sort of decided, and was at least talking about it seriously for a time. When she mentioned it to one of my colleagues, an established provocateur, he fired back, “You’re a coward if you don’t go.” Not exactly your standard warm and fuzzy offer of support and praise for having the intention.

After she did go, a few years later, she knew I would see him again and told me to tell him that she had indeed gone to the monastery. “What he said stuck with me,” she said, “because he was right.”

All provocateurs have one thing in mind, no matter what field they are working in: to wake people up to an injustice and a wrong and to get them beyond their complacency to a place of action.

Here is one story of a provocateur’s provocateur, who devoted her life to waking people up. Her life reminds us of the perils and the joys of the provocateur’s call.

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MARY HARRIS: PROVOCATEUR EXTRAORDINAIRE

In the 1830s in Ireland the Catholics were oppressed by British rule, as they had been with varying degrees of intensity for many centuries. A baby girl born into these conditions would be buried an old lady nearly a hundred years later in middle America, southern Illinois to be exact, having become one of the greatest labor agitators the world had ever seen. One of her early life memories from Ireland in the city of Cork was of British soldiers carrying the severed heads of Irish resisters on pikes through her hometown. The early exposure to violence may have explained why she so often put herself in harm’s way in her work decades later—she was born into it.

Her father, Richard Harris, fled to Canada to escape with his life— his father had been hanged as a traitor. The Harris family moved to Chicago, and in her twenties Mary Harris moved to Memphis, where she married George Jones. They lived in a working-class neighborhood and had four children in quick succession. George was a proud member of the Iron Molders’ Union, one of the earliest trade unions.

Mary started her family in Memphis, and it ended there as well. When the yellow fever swept through the city, the poor neighborhoods, with people too sick to leave and little health care, were hit the hardest. Mary lost her husband and all four children in the same futile battle with the disease.

She managed to go on, somehow. Six years later she returned to Chicago to become a seamstress, sewing the beautiful dresses of the growing upper class in that city. In 1871, she lost what she had again, this time in the Great Fire. And while returning to a life of labor to make ends meet, Mary’s real calling was sparked by the Knights of Labor and the other labor unions that were starting up all over the nation and getting a foothold in the fast industrializing city of Chicago. Mary Harris, listening to the rousing speeches of men like Terrance Powderly, found herself deeply aligned with the causes of labor in the mines and factories to stop child labor and to end the brutally long hours, unsafe conditions, and low wages of the working class.

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Now in her forties Mary Harris answered a call to justice in the workplace that would carry her for another fifty years. She started a publication called Appeal to Reason in 1895 and in the course of her work took on none other than tycoon John D. Rockefeller. Mary Harris would become the famous and infamous Mother Jones, of course, and she would cross the country for decades, organizing strikes, protests, and generally getting in the face of the industrialists, always pushing for fair treatment.

From our vantage point, if we are middle class or above, it is hard to fathom the working conditions for the men, women, and children getting off the boats and coming off the farms to work in the city’s factories or the country’s coal mines in the late 1800s.

A common practice in the coal mines was to pay in company scrip rather than dollars. The miners and their families would then have to pay for necessities at the company store, where prices were high. The result would be miners working sixty-hour weeks for a month, and after receiving pay and using it for rent and food, owing the company money, a kind of negative 401k plan.

Another abomination that fueled Mother Jones’s inner fire was the abuse of children in the factories. In 1895, she observed young children in the cotton mills of Alabama. In her autobiography she wrote, “The children, little children working, the most heartrending spectacle in life.… They crawled under machinery to oil it. They replaced spindles all day long, all night long: night through, night through. Tiny babies of six years old with faces of sixty did an eight-hour shift for ten cents a day.” Four-year-olds came to the mills to help older brothers and sisters. They, however, received no pay.²

Mother Jones showed up at the hottest hot spots of unrest to further her cause. Skilled in attracting publicity, she knew how to get the media to give her cause the coverage she wanted. Unionizing the West Virginia coal mines was a decades-long effort for her. During one of her well-known speeches, in 1912, she held up a mine guard’s uniform, full of bullet holes and bloodied, and said it was decorated to suit her. Guns were stockpiled on both sides and Mother Jones would regularly walk into armed territories to hold another rally. Banned from cities and whole states, she would wear disguises and sneak past the guards and police to live in the shanties with “her boys” and their families, as she referred to them.

“If they shoot me, I will talk from the grave,” she once told a crowd in Denver.

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Ludlow, Colorado, was the scene of her pitched battle with the Rockefellers, owners of a large mine. With one thousand striking miners and families living in a tent colony, the company guards turned on the strikers, torching the tents, firing shots, and using bombs. Twelve children, five men, and two women were killed in the process. Mother Jones testified in Washington after the tragedy, as did John D. Rockefeller, Jr., with whom she later struck up a relationship. “I’ve licked him many times but now we’ve made peace,” she eventually said.

When Mother Jones died she was most likely in her nineties, although people celebrated her hundredth birthday—May 1, 1930—because no one knew exactly when she was born. By the time she was laid to rest, she and her peers had provoked the country into considering a whole new approach to labor. The major labor legislation of the 1930s owes its existence at least in part to the tireless work of the provocateur from Ireland whose last five decades of life were a continuous battle against the abuses of the powerful.

At her funeral, one poem read aloud ended with these words:

• The wonderful spirit of old Mother Jones
• May march up and down
• Like the soul of John Brown
• Till justice shall vanquish our burdens and groans,
• And oppression is buried like old Mother Jones.

WHAT PROVOCATEURS DO

On a dramatic scale Mother Jones illuminates how provocateurs stay true to their calling. While most of us will never do visible work on the scale of a Mother Jones, we can learn from the lessons of the provocateurs to battle the issues we do address.

EMBODY THE ISSUES

Provocateurs become the issue, the movement. They live the change needed and they become the hero of those wanting the change and the enemy of those defending the status quo. They become living symbols of what they are fighting for.

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EXAGGERATE TO FORCE ATTENTION

Provocateurs say outlandish and extreme things to make a point and rattle cages. By articulating intense versions of the truth, they crystallize issues, creating an opposite pole from the pole of injustice that exists but few seem willing to see. The freedom marchers in Birmingham in the sixties provoked the response of the bigots, bringing them out of hiding. Exaggerating disobedience to a bad law, rather than quietly ignoring it, allows the provocateurs to create the chemistry for social change.

Martin Luther King is very clear on the subject: “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”³

HOLD UP THE MIRROR

As a society denies the injustice, the provocateur finds ways to put the wrongdoing in its face. “In case you haven’t noticed, society,” say the antismoking activists, “there seems to be a connection, in spite of forty years of denial by the companies, between the amount of cool cigarette ads aimed at kids and the amount of lung cancer.”

The mirror can be humorous, not grim, as some provocateurs have learned well. In fighting the flat tax idea (which sometimes seems like a good idea given the complexities of tax returns but would disadvantage those who can’t afford taxes) the folks in United for a Fair Economy chanted at a rally against the flat tax idea and its former champion, Steve Forbes, with their little rhymes:

• “Who needs day care,
  Hire an au pair.”
  “Make workers pay the tax,
  So investors can relax.”⁴

PACE THE AGGRAVATION

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Provocateurs know their success depends on timing and applying pressure. Too little pressure, and no change occurs. Too much, and the backlash is so great that the cause is lost. Or worse, the cause is ignored as being hopelessly extreme.

In his lifelong fight against apartheid, Nelson Mandela constantly judged the pace of his activity. He schooled himself in military tactics when he was convinced it was time for destruction of property as a way to cripple the system that was crippling his people.

FORMULATE SYMBOLS FOR COMMUNICATION NUGGETS

Provocateurs create the symbols of resistance and energy around which their followers can rally and sustain their energy and focus.

Gifford Pinchot tells a delightful story of an engineer-provocateur bent on innovation who named his innovation project the “Anvil Project.” Whenever he wanted to enlist the support of a new person, after the initial meeting he sent them an anvil pin that could fit on a blouse or lapel. The person could wear it proudly, or ignore it, but no one was in the dark as to its blacksmith meaning. The provocateur forged a new method, bending the current process into a new, more usable form. The metaphor stuck (and the project was finished).

In the early days of Ben & Jerry’s, Pillsbury was strong-arming distributors not to carry the super-rich ice creams from Vermont. With corporate size and powerful lawyers on Pillsbury’s side, the smaller company knew a frontal assault would be useless. So they started an energetic leaflet campaign with the phrase, “What’s the doughboy afraid of?” The Pillsbury logo got turned against that firm and the symbol of the doughboy helped draw the matter to a quick close.

From the raised clenched fist of black power in the sixties, to the Greenpeace motorboats scooting in front of the giant whaling boats, to the lone student in Tiananmen Square who blocked the progress of the tank, provoking symbolically is one of the hallmarks of those called to be provocateurs.

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GUT IT OUT

Many provocateurs don’t see themselves as particularly heroic, but they grow aware of the pain and all the negative consequences that can occur when they buck the system. They are simply willing to absorb the hits for the good of the cause. All callings are about head and heart and guts. This one is strong on the guts part.

Author and consultant Peter Block talks about his more recent work: “The most difficult part [of being called to his current work] is knowing that you are going against the culture. Facing the drowning doubt about practicality. Pursuing efforts that are financially marginal, and having only a small group of people that support them but yourself.”

An important attribute of the courage of provocateurs is that it is not a onetime, hero-for-the moment thing. It is a long-term proposition, taking years of fortitude to supply the provocateur with enough stamina for the long haul.

The courage of provocateurs ignites the courage in their peers and followers. It becomes an example to follow, a beacon to light the way. The trail of civil disobedience from Henry David Thoreau to Gandhi to Martin Luther King to César Chavez creates a chain link of courageous acts that send out hope and inspiration for us all.

If they can face jail and death, we ought to be able to face a boss who allows sexual harassment, confront a policy that shrivels instead of enables, or stand up to a teacher who harangues.

GUIDELINES FOR EVERYDAY PROVOCATEURS

Here are some points to keep in mind.

PREPARE FOR ATTACKS AND FIGHT BITTERNESS WITH GOOD HUMOR

As Marcus Aurelius put it:

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Once the provoking begins, the provocateur has a new, one-uniform wardrobe: a shirt with a big circle and a bull’s eye in the middle of it on the back. The provocateur becomes a magnet for anger relating to the issue at hand and many other kinds of anger as well. When you take your stance, what people don’t like about life will be projected onto you. Much of the anger and criticism won’t be deserved as you are maligned and your motives and intentions are questioned. Unless you are a contrarian by nature, this will hurt a lot. If you are a contrarian, it will hurt some eventually anyway.

Be prepared for the injustices and keep an open heart. If you become bitter, then they have won. If you start to become cynical, do something—forgive your antagonists, read a funny book, go to a movie, eat some ice cream, take a vacation. Losing your perspective and sense of humor can be the end of your effectiveness as a provocateur.

PROVOKE THE STIFLERS MORE THAN THEY CAN HANDLE

When those perpetrating the injustice and resisting the change tell you now is not a good time to provoke and keep pushing, they may be right. But usually they are not. Your job is to push for the change, confront the system they hold dear, confront them with their own encrusted habits and faulty beliefs. As their mental models and belief systems are assaulted, they are the ones who have to deal with their pain, as best as they know how. That is their job, not yours.

“I have never yet engaged in a direct action that was ‘well-timed,’ according to the timetable of those who have not suffered.… For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’” wrote Martin Luther King, Jr. in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” one of the bibles for those with a provocateur’s calling.⁵

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DON’T BECOME YOUR OWN MYTH

It is easy to get righteous about the provocateur’s call. After all, aren’t you trying to correct an injustice? But the trick is not to mythologize yourself into a heroic battle wherein you embody all virtue and others are the devil incarnate. The status quo may be filled with enemies who think differently from you, but you are lost if you think you are the only source of good on the issue.

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One reason provocateurs fail is personalizing the wrongdoing and trying to destroy their enemies instead of their enemies’ ideas and practices.

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Nelson Mandela gave the perfect example of fighting his own larger-than-life heroic myth, which grew stronger the more years he spent in prison. He invited his captors, the jailers from his Robbin Island life, to his Presidential inauguration. Rather than puffing himself up as the embodiment of all good, he declared that his jailers were good people, victimized as much, if not more, by apartheid than he was, only the mental bars they lived in were not as visible as the physical ones he endured every day.

When you find yourself getting too righteous and self-congratulatory, you are on your way to trouble as a provocateur.

GET REST AND MAKE FRIENDS

In keeping with the anti-myth rule, provocateurs need to stay rested and make friends along the way. If they aren’t careful, when a cause burns in their heart, provocateurs can burn out, approximating the supple texture of something between a strip of crisp bacon and last year’s peanut brittle.

Stay loose, provocateurs. Get friends by being one. Take interest in your friends’ nonprovocateur but intentional and called lives. Take greater interest in your third-grader’s homework. Call your mom and ask her what she is up to. Listen to the oldies and dance on the kitchen floor with your sweetheart.

Burn intensely, provocateurs, and then enjoy a weekend with a mystery novel, Alfred Hitchcock classics, and lots of naps.

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BE PREPARED TO ACCEPT DEFEAT

Provocateurs wouldn’t be provocateurs if they were working for a sure thing. The call of provocateurs is to work against the odds, to swim upstream, to see the deck is stacked against them and decide to go for it anyway, to put a dent in the problem in some way, knowing that they may never see the result. Others behind them will see the dent and take a swing at it because they did.

That is what provocateurs are called to do—to bear witness to a better way, to a principle that must be remembered when most have forgotten. Provocateurs are ready to lose the round but to stay in the fight, because not to do so would be to sell out to a lower principle, to a wrong that must not be fed.

Peter Block says it best. When he is asked when our social condition will finally improve, when will we see an end to human injustice, when will we turn the corner on the causes that we are working for, he puts it simply:

“It will get better the day after you die.”

PROVOKE WHEN YOU HAVE LITTLE AUTHORITY, SPONSOR PROVOCATEURS WHEN YOU HAVE IT

Many a corporate provocateur reports that gray-haired revolutionary roles can be different from the twenty-something and thirty-something versions. Although some gray-hairs stay at it, like Mother Jones, many mellow out with less hormonal support. They grow tired of the energy drain, have kids in college and a mortgage to pay, tolerate less risk, and want to pass on their wisdom. Not only that, somehow they stayed at it long enough, and were lucky or skillful enough, or both, to gain authority. They have become vice presidents of something or other, or their start-up company has become a real place with real jobs. Wasn’t Bill Gates part of the revolution a long time ago? Weren’t you in a rock band before you woke up and found yourself a director of IT at Acme Services?

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It is at this stage in your life that sponsoring provocateurs may well become your calling. Without the seasoned help of a sponsor, many provocateurs run out of resources, or create such a backlash that their idea is snuffed out. Sponsors step in to guide, and generally wise up the provocateurs with their efforts.

Provocateur sponsors are like grandparents, invaluable friends and guides who get to walk away from the direct implementation because the provocateurs need and want to do that part. But a sponsor’s calling is not easy. Knowing when to scold, to sooth, to challenge, to protect, to let the provocateur fail miserably if necessary are all part of the many judgment calls sponsors must make.

At a large corporation where I have worked there was a well-known executive who sponsored many a provocateur over the years of his being a senior vice president and eventually president of a six-thousand-person division. He was known for his approachability, his irreverence and outspokenness in the executive suite with his peers, and his protection, tutelage, and ability to squirrel away extra cash in his budget for the provocateur-innovators who needed some to get a project off the ground.

Here are two good resources if you contemplate sponsorship as one of your calls. Gifford Pinchot’s Intrapreneuring: Why You Don’t Have to Leave the Corporation to Become an Entrepreneur written in the ancient 1980s, is a pioneering and classic work that still reads intelligently. His other book, written with Libby Pinchot, The Intelligent Organization, is also very helpful and a nineties piece that helps sponsors know what they are sponsoring. And Gary Hamel’s Leading the Revolution, with unfortunate examples like Enron included (which reminds us what Enron might have been if it stayed value-based and not greed-based), is a fun and insightful read on sponsors as well.⁶

Writer, farmer, ecologist, and teacher Wendell Berry created a poem for us to remember in the times when we may be tempted to take the easy road and miss our summons to be a provocateur.

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The Mad Farmer Revolution

Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay.

Want more of everything ready made.

Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery any more.

Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something, they will call you.

When they want you to die for profit, they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.

Love the Lord.

Love the world.

Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace the flag.

Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.

Give your approval to all you cannot understand.

Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not yet destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium.

Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.

Listen to carrion—put your ear close, and hear the faint chatterings of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world.

Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable.

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men.

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Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields. Lie easy in the shade.

Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest in your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it.

Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go.

Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction.

Practice Resurrection.⁷

Wendell Berry himself was called—called to remind us that our calls to living our uniqueness are more likely to come from carrion than from the newspaper.

(Note for those too young to remember punch cards: If Wendell Berry were to compose this today and not in the days when IBM punch cards were the technology of choice, the sixth line, Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer, might have read something like this: Your mind will sit poised in a psychographic database, ready to be mined.)

Working for the Destruction of the Negative

Provoke the deconstruction of all conditions that limit human potential, even if you have no way of knowing what your results will be. From the long history of courageous provocateurs who have lived the courage to make a difference, learn the lessons of what provoking does and how it works.

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Be strategic; a provocateur’s call is a thinking person’s call, one of courage to do the right thing, obviously, but also of strategy to employ well-timed tactics that will work.

At some point, your calling may well be to sponsor other provocateurs by acting as their guide. Be wise in your lessons and guidance.

As the path of courage includes moral alignment and truth, stay true to your conviction without getting holier than thou or bitter. Self-righteous provocateurs are pains in the butt, not to mention a danger to the cause, themselves, and others.

EXERCISE: PROVOKING WITH SKILL AND COURAGE

• Think back over your life and see if you have been a provocateur at least a few times. If you are constantly in that mode, are you overdoing it? If you have never confronted an injustice, aren’t you being too complacent?
• When did you provoke well, with courage and skill?
• When did you blow it and have poor tactics or courage deficits, or both?
• Have you ever read a book about, or do you have any heroes or sheroes, who are or were provocateurs? If not, why not?
• Does attacking the establishment always turn you off? Why?
• Didn’t our founding fathers provoke England? Didn’t César Chavez do legitimate work? Do you know a provocateur now who is trying his or her best?
• Isn’t there one condition you are aware of where human stifling is the result? How are you working to limit or stop the damage?
• Do you know anyone who needs to be shocked a bit out of complacency?