Choose

Ari Weinzweig on facing and working with change ...

In much the same way as people like me have long loved listening to “River Man” without having a clue about the complexity of playing in 5/4 time signature, many people like the feel of Zingerman’s without understanding the impact of collaborative and only minimally hierarchical ways in which we work. Many experiment with our alternative approaches but all too often abandon them before they can really start to take hold. The same awkwardness that goes with starting to learn to play 5/4 is, I’ll suggest, true as well when it comes to leading in this collaborative, consensus, leader-among-leaders sort of way. At first, both will feel uncomfortable, and the urge to “go back” to what one is accustomed to will be strong. But like 5/4, if we stick with these “different” governance approaches, a whole host of new possibilities will open up for us and for our organizations. It will likely take a while, but over time it will take hold. For me, after all these years, working with collaboration and consensus nearly always feels completely normal and natural. And yet, at the same time, for new folks coming into the ZCoB, it can feel frustrating—like things take forever.

It's up to us to choose: We can work the way most around us have worked, sticking with the ways that feel most comfortable. Or, alternatively, we can lean into the awkward, work at it over time, and in the process create our own collaborative way. As Susan Griffin writes, “How many small decisions accumulate to form a habit? What a multitude of decisions, made by others, in other times, must shape our lives now.” Both 4/4 and 5/4 can work, but the latter, as Mike Goodman writes, opens new possibilities. As someone taught me many years ago, “Practice doesn’t make perfect, but if you stick with it does make ‘permanent.’"