Let’s all get started: 5 steps to action | with Jon Alexander

0:00Hey everyone and thanks for being here. Just to let you know, we're running a quick survey to see if listening to this podcast affects your sense of hopefulness. The link's in the description. Thanks and enjoy the show. You know what I think we're missing, Matt? What's that? Like, you know, a handbook. A kind of Project 2025 except for nice people. Like a blow-by-blow guide for how to unscrew the world. Yeah, like we've dipped our toe in with a few tips here and there. But now it's time to get into the nitty-gritty. Exactly. OK, so this episode is our best attempt at that handbook from what we've learned on our road trip.

0:36A first draft. And just before we get started, we're going to cover all our bases here with a nice, neat disclaimer. The opinions expressed in this episode are the individual opinions of our hosts and our guests. And if you choose to take these opinions and change the world for the better with them, well, that is entirely up to you. Do it. In a time full of challenges, we're going to take you on a journey of the possible. I think often we get told that you can't have that or we couldn't possibly do this, but we actually can. Stories that show how ordinary people can take matters into their own hands.

1:13We don't take no for an answer anymore, so we just try and find a way around that. And create a future we all actually want to live in, one that could change our whole country. Just incredible to me. They've basically just been like, these guys aren't going to do it, we're just going to do it ourselves. You can find links to the things we mention on our website, antidotelive.studio, or videos on our social channels, Antidote Live. Sometimes in a world that's not always working out. It's time to say, screw this. Let's try something else. So this episode, we're going to break from format to dive deep and try and answer the question, if you did want to do something like this, well, what works?

1:52How does it work? Putting yourself out there on any level to create something in your community can feel uncomfortable and scary. But throughout this series, we've seen so many uniting themes that a pretty damn useful playbook has begun to form. One that could turn the scary into the, well, achievable. So what follows is just that. We're going to hear from some of the incredible people we've met on our road trip around the UK. Mark in Bristol, Josie in Grimsby, Charlotte in Shropshire, Lee in Northern Ireland and Immy in Birmingham. plus a few wise words from creator of Donut Economics, Kate Raworth.

2:26We're going to assume you've met all of these folks by listening to our first five episodes, so if you haven't, you may want to go back and dive into those. And then with our special guest, John Alexander, author of the book Citizens, someone who's really pushing to get our collective capacity for change out there into the world and who's worked with hundreds of these types of projects, we'll take you through the first five steps of doing something that could be world-changing. And you can use these five steps for wherever you are in your journey. Maybe you're ready to take the ball by the horns and create something.

2:55Or maybe, and this is often the best place to start, you want to get involved in a project that's already going. And Matt, we've got a great tool for this. Yeah, see our postcode search tool at antidotelive.studio to find what amazing projects are already happening within five miles of your house. Or maybe you just want to tell your friends about it or bank all this useful info for later. Whatever your angle, you're welcome here. So let's get going. Step one, find the others. Okay, so this first idea of find the others, find other people. And that's something that you, John, you talk about a lot.

3:30Yeah, it's sort of weirdly become a kind of catchphrase.

3:34Jon Alexander:Like there's a little bit of geekiness underneath it, right? Which is I always talk, as you know, about citizens, not consumers. Like that is the kind of John hashtag. I'm very passionate about the word citizen. and people often say like don't talk about citizens because there are citizens and non-citizens it becomes a kind of leak and I'm like we have to fight for that word we need that word because the literal derivation of the word citizen actually is together people it literally means like humans who don't mean anything unless they're with other humans so to be a citizen is to find the others basically.

4:09Everybody lives somewhere and you find yourself living where you are so you can make a choice you can either shut your front door close your curtains and have nothing to do with your neighbourhood or you can be engaged in the life of the place that you live. We are not just alienated individuals in our little units of housing we have a deep deep connection to each other. If you're anywhere across the country and you're thinking god I'm too small to make a change most of the work that we've done started with a cup of tea. So there were nine of us doing this together but nine of us who all have our own networks, families, friends were tempted to kind of really individualize society to isolate everything and that it's only nine people.

4:51It's not because everyone's bringing all those relationships and connections into the room with them as well. One of the things that's really evident is a lot of the time when you look around at how these things started it starts over food or drink like emmy says it starts with a cup of tea in carrot fergus they organized a meal to bring people together like and these are such simple things like meeting in a cafe meeting in a pub this is where this stuff starts so you're not really waiting for like a tall wizard to show up to invite you on a quest the absolute opposite

5:21Jon Alexander:there's not this this sort of dramatic right i'm going forth there's just like there's just a thing that happens where they're like i'm just gonna host a dinner i'm just gonna invite someone around for a cup of tea is like the tiniest move often it's so exciting to think about reframing that the place change starts to the kitchen table and the thing you need to start it as a kettle rather than what we think at the moment which is change starts somewhere else far away from me yeah because everybody has a kitchen table and so like it gives us a framing to think about change in a way that is there for everyone in the episodes you've done it's lee rob going like I'm going to start a Facebook group with Billy it's going to the council meeting and getting sufficiently frustrated that he has to stand up and say something and then saying let's go and clean the street and have a cup of tea it's interesting to me to hear it because first it's obviously it sounds so simple but it is in a way exactly the opposite of what everything around us is trying to make us do yes right so everything is trying to isolate us and make us feel alone or put us in you know individual units and I can't help but think that just benefits the status quo whether by design or by default it just helps keep things the way they are absolutely the nature of the incentives in social media and so on is it's an attention economy right and you can't pay attention to social media if you're with other people yeah like ironically given that it's called social media and you're right like the stories that surround us all the time I started my career in the advertising industry and the critical moment for me was when my first boss said what you've got to remember is the average consumer sees something like 3 000 commercial messages a day and all of those messages are coded with you're a consumer you're an individual pursue your individual self-interest that is the background noise and so yes it is super hard to break out of that and like i said when we talked about lee and her story it's both super hard and ridiculously simple I think there's something here also about for those of us who, you know, maybe have wanted to try and bring about change.

7:33I do think for such a long time, the messages we got was like, it's not big enough. You're not really going to bring about change. This is not important enough. And I think sometimes and makes you feel like the simple action of sitting around a table with people, you know, and talking about where you are is just ridiculous. Like there's no way that's going to change things. But I think every single one of these stories, the thing that's amazing about them is that they do do that. They kind of break that spell that we've been cast under.

8:04Jon Alexander:There's a lovely phrase from the work on what's called asset-based community development, which is one of the theory strands of this guy called Cormac Russell. One of the things that Cormac talks about is moving at the speed of trust. So the speed of trust is slow at the beginning because it is all about relationships. It's about opening conversations that might feel uncomfortable. but further down the line the speed of trust is damn fast right like once things are moving and the trust is there it's exponential and i think that's what all of your stories have shown actually like there there is a sort of a beautiful smallness at the beginning because that's what it requires for people not just to trust each other but trust themselves that they can do it but then once it builds get out of the way another thing i think that is really empowering is you sometimes think you need a huge number of people but all these stories show the core team is normally between eight and 12 people yeah and there's this amazing thing i've always held in the back of my mind when seeing all these stories that jeff bezos when he started the big company he runs uh had a rule that you were only allowed to have a team that you could feed with two pizzas the idea being that you can then make decisions quickly you can build that trust fast within a smaller group of people and if you need a bigger team you just have to have another team you can't expand that team and there's a whole thing about also about the number 12 condors it's dozen that's why it's a jury like it's numbers that sort of group size is like the smallest the biggest number of people that can easily come to consensus so that's such an empowering thing because you often think like you you think in terms of change is like a petition maybe you might and you might need to get a hundred thousand or a million signatures but like if you're setting out to find other people you share a passion for a place and some stuff that you care about and you're only trying to find another eight or nine of them that starts to make this change feel like not impossible which is why it is happening everywhere it's really interesting to hear this idea that it's happening everywhere because when i think about our society as a whole i find myself feeling like nothing is happening um and i guess i'm probably not alone in that is that just a real misconception short answer yes good that is good that is the right answer like i show up somewhere anywhere yeah and i'm like walking along the street and you just get a bit of an instinct you see that there's a little group of people huddled around the table and you're like oh i know what that is i've spent some time in a new city recently and within two days i found six different community initiatives that no one told me were there but I can explain the dynamic of it, right?

10:41Jon Alexander:Like, I think it is back to the media, right? The radar of our media is tuned to the idea that power is in Whitehall and Westminster and Washington and Davos. And so that's where they send all the freaking cameras, you know? And this stuff just doesn't get any attention. In the parlance of the big-name editors, any one of these things is not a story, right? any one of these things is a cute exception to give five minutes on the end of the actual news and that's sort of in the nature of our storytelling today I think because we are trapped in this notion that change will be done for us rather than by us and so I do think a huge challenge for this work and one of the reasons I love you guys so much is the storytelling right We have to find ways for this to come together to be visible.

11:33Going around and seeing all this stuff, seeing the potential in all of the amazing stuff that's happening. I'd stake my kid's future on this, not the stuff that's in the front of the news. So how do we get these stories to be the story, not to be the addendum on the end of the story? Because I think the next generations will live in a better world if we can do that. Step two, ask what everyone wants. so you've got your core group one thing everyone does in different ways with postcards or surveys or knocking on doors is go and ask a huge number of people everyone in their community what they want like everybody that we've featured in all of this series has done this at a really big level they've asked a lot of people how important is that to getting this stuff to to work i mean i

12:20Jon Alexander:think it's huge so this crucial moment when you go from okay we've got a little group of us around the table we've got this energy we're feeding off each other's energy so this thing can sustain itself in some way an idea might already have come up from that um that you can then like verify but it can also be like what do we actually want like an open question and that then gives people permission to to reflect you know the ability to sit down and listen to a stranger is massive it's massively important. I think that it gives us opportunities to blow apart the lie that we're all divided and that we all hate each other.

13:04It gives us an opportunity to see that actually the opposite is true. That, you know, when you put us together and you give us the opportunity, we're far more interested in caring for each other than we are in tearing each other down. I think the strategy can be replicated, do exactly what we've done, and that is consult with local residents. Just because we're a resident don't mean to say that we know what other residents want. Work with other residents, find out what they think their problems are, bring them together like we did and ask them, well, you've told us these are your problems, what's the solutions?

13:35What do you think we need to do? Because like I said, your community know where they want to get. Empower those residents as much as you can. I think an important part of that is this sense that as that core group, you're not going in pushing a thing hard forward. You're going in doing this questioning, doing this listening. so it's a different much more interactive thing than maybe we're used to where somebody's got a thing they want to bash through and they're trying to get everyone to support them it's opening the thing up making the invite feel invitational to everyone including the people who might not normally feel invited in

14:07Jon Alexander:yeah it begins by actively seeking some of the furthest some of the conventionally furthest away and whatever furthest away means politically, disability, like racial, socioeconomic, whatever But why is it so important to reach that far away? What benefit does it really bring? What do we see? I mean, ultimately, I think it comes back to this concept of the speed of trust, right? Like it's, if you do something, you're just becoming another hero. You're doing something for people, and then expecting them to thank you for it. You're not doing it with them. And I think that this is another of my little catchphrases.

14:48Jon Alexander:All of us are smarter than any of us, right? Like, and I think if you really start to do this work, you really believe that. Like, I really believe that. there are ideas out there and they come from different world views right and it's precisely because the world view is different that the view of the challenge or the opportunity will be different and so you will get ideas from there that you won't get from people who you immediately affiliate with if you get all of that information by knowing what everybody wants you are just better They're equipped to do good stuff. Yeah. And secondly, because if you exclude at this stage, you've created like a deep vulnerability.

15:28To the idea. Because some people won't feel like they've had their say and therefore they'll resist it.

15:33Jon Alexander:They'll have been pushed out. If they feel it's been open to them and they chose not to step into it, that's very different to feeling like they've been excluded again. Yeah, that's true. And if you make them feel they've been excluded again, then... then you're no different I guess than lots of the other things that have come before and have failed right because I think that is the nature of leadership in this world is to hold questions not provide answers and to see your role as being to to create the process and the space and the means for the answers to arise from everywhere because I guess part of this is is this isn't all easy or comfortable but it's not hard in the ways that people think it's hard does that make sense Yeah, 100%.

16:15It's hard because sometimes maybe you have to reach out to people you wouldn't naturally have a cup of tea with.

16:20Jon Alexander:Yeah. There is something I really want to say on this, though, which is I think what is important is that you're asking about what the desirable thing is, what the future is, rather than asking what's wrong. This isn't about let's analyze the greatest problems of our community. That's a really important distinction, actually. Because that is generally how a central government assessment works or whatever, right? It tells the problems. It's an index of multiple deprivation that tells you just how crap everything is. And I'll give you my second Cormac Russellism. I knew I'd go to Cormac again. You have to imagine the Irish accent.

16:55Jon Alexander:But he has this lovely thing. It's to start with what's strong, not with what's wrong, and then use what's strong to fix what's wrong. This guy's got some good lines. I know, right? So this is the thing you're really trying to do when you're asking the community what they want. You're not directing their energy into the negative. you're not mobilizing them behind your answer you might be offering a possibility into that space but most likely you're saying something along the lines of what if grimsby what if the east marsh could be a place you were really proud to live what what would it take to get there and and even if there's a specific idea that what if framing can really help there's a purposefulness but also a lightness to that kind of frame i think that lets people come in you're not asking them a for a solution they may have one but that's what i hear is you're asking them for the kind of life they want to live yeah and some of that is it's a creative question it's like there's this idea that we lack these spaces to come together and dream and imagine but once you start coming together and talking to people that's kind of what you're doing you're you're talking about what do you want your area to be like yeah yeah i think there's another aspect to this as well we also have this tendency to want to do the right thing with a capital t-r-n-t right our educations our conditioning have told us that you have to analyze and pick the most important intervention point and so that's what drives us into this kind of problem identification narrative and this work really is the opposite of that it's not about doing the right thing it's about doing the thing that enables energy to flow um and trusting that that will then become the right thing and that's That's really what's underneath Cormac's little aphorism, right?

18:40Jon Alexander:Start with what's strong. Don't ignore what's wrong, but don't start with it. And then use what's strong to fix what's wrong. It does feel like, though,

18:54sometimes you can feel like there's no time to do this. Because the scale of the things we're trying to solve are so urgent. and I hear this a lot out there I you know I feel this sometimes myself and I battle with it do we have time to do all of this like or do we just need to get on with it and I I guess what I'm asking is why is that not effective in your experience to just say hey look we don't have time to ask all these people and do all this stuff we just got to do it I mean the first thing I'm

19:27Jon Alexander:thinking of is that lovely phrase like times are urgent we must slow down which is the I think it's Bayo Komalafi, isn't it, the Nigerian philosopher? But yeah, I get you, right? Like there's this thing of like the strong man leader, the strong leader, whether man or otherwise, delivers the answer, steps into the complexness and imposes order on it. One person imposing their will on a situation is never going to be as effective as people coming together and building together. Because it works. Because everywhere we've been that has shown these amazing examples, that's what they've done and they've all succeeded.

20:01There's a level of humility. Like if you ask Mark what he wants to do in his area, he'll tell you he doesn't know because he hasn't asked anyone recently. They're not just paying lip service to these ideas. They genuinely want to hear them. And that is what's driving them. And then the other side of that, if you're someone who's receiving that question, that's something special too, right? Like it's so rare for anyone to really ask us what we truly deeply want.

20:27Jon Alexander:Absolutely. I mean, at the core of it, you're creating, you're offering joy, right? Like the act of asking a question is the act of like inviting someone into some agency that far too few of us have had for far too long. And that's just a gift. And why not give it to as many people as possible? Step three, build your vision and know your values. OK, so we've got our small group of people. Now we've asked everyone what they want. We've got a real vibe of where the support lies. One of the things people have said, a lot of the groups we visited spend a lot of time understanding what the vision and values of that community are.

21:03What vision are they trying to get to and what values do they want to get there with? And they write them down. They literally have a list. We've spent a lot of time on the values and understanding why we're doing what we're doing and what for. It's like if you wouldn't get in a car and drive to Cornwall if you didn't have a map, because how would you know how to get there? We've got five values. we are joyful, imaginative, genuine, empathic and trusting. We are joyful because we're doing this with joy and love. We are imaginative because you've got to think it before you can do it. We are empathic because human connection is really important.

21:39We're genuine because we say what we mean and we mean what we say and we trust each other, we trust the universe, we trust people. People know, they're experts in their own lives, trust them to know what they want and need. These words, they underpin everything that we do and we look at everything that we do and go, does this come back to our values? One of our values at Ford Hall is to sow the seed and that is to kind of just try things out and not be afraid to fail and to try something new. But what's most important is that we learn from what we do and we share that learning.

22:13Jon Alexander:This thing of the values is you've opened and now you need to build some determination and to do that you have to understand what holds you together. And often we hear about values either in business where they're almost like the thing that you're not doing. It's like, oh, let's write innovations are value because we're really not doing innovation. But this is you're taking them seriously. You're like, we're going to identify how we're going to do things. What is our compass? We're going to do it in a way that involves or respects everyone. We're going to do it in a way that thinks about future generations, whatever it might be.

22:45And that's going to be our actual compass, not it's going to be a slogan on the wall or like just making it superficial. And that's so, like we all have values. That's how we make all of our decisions. But that isn't how we run our society at the moment. So we're not used to seeing them actually taken seriously. You know what I really like about this is it really flies in the face of something that we keep being told, which is that we're too different from each other. We don't have the same values as those people. What I'm hearing is bring that diversity in and then set these values, which means it is possible, which means we're not so far away from one another.

23:18I think it really challenges that narrative that somehow there are like British values that are uniquely for white people and that no one else can be a part of it. When actually these communities are diverse and in so many ways, not just race. And by coming together and doing this and then setting your values, you kind of disprove that idea that we don't have the same values. And another thing I want to address is that there may be some people listening and thinking, why do this now? Why not get on with it and just get doing the thing? And yeah, probably some of this stuff is going to happen side by side.

23:51But the reason to do it early is that vision and values are protective. If you work out what is important to you early on, things are less likely to splinter halfway down the line. And Charlotte from Ford Hall Farm talked to us about this. You can get bound up in a lot of detail and you can disagree on a lot of things. Actually, if you do your vision first, it's very hard to disagree on things because really, at any given point in time, you are always going towards that same vision. So it stays very aligned and very cohesive. And actually, even when there's disagreements, because you're all going to the same place, it just works.

24:29And it's a huge strength and a huge resilience to have that. So here, vision and values give you a way to respond quickly when you're thinking what else you could do. The vision and values give you a way you've already agreed to, to say, well, well, we could try this. Bang, it fits the values. Let's do it. Or no, it doesn't. Maybe we should think again.

24:49Jon Alexander:Yeah, it gives you a structure for that conversation. If that is a concern that's coming up, we have a way to talk about it and find a different way of addressing it. Step four, decide on a thing to do. So we've got our group of people. We've asked everyone what they want. We've understood our values, how we're going to do it. What are we going to do? I mean, that's kind of the question, right? And maybe it comes in parallel with the values thing and maybe you're starting to sense into something already. But there is a moment of commitment. There is a moment where that first thing to do, whether it's like create a magazine or start a community energy thing or create a greengrocer or whatever.

25:33Jon Alexander:There's something tangible, real in the world that people in that place will interact with. and ultimately none of this is real without that. You're not going to be able to deliver everything that everybody wants but like I say, by looking outside of your local area, finding what funding streams are out there, finding what the current trendy agenda is at that current time, see if any of those things, those assets, matches up with what it is you want to deliver. There's lots of things we want to deliver but we can only concentrate on those that were doable and by saying doable, the support was there, the funds were there, the opportunity was there.

26:10It feels really amazing, right, to have built something really concrete that you can actually touch. It gives you a lot of credibility because there's a lot of people just sitting at desks doing research and writing papers and thinking that they're influencing change. And actually, we just need people to build real stuff. People keep coming up to me saying, when's the next book? When's the next book? And I say, I'm not writing the next book. You know, what the world needs is action. Let's do it. there's been a lot of conversation about building something like doing something tangible something that demonstrates the way you want the world