The Gathering: Becoming regeneratively managed - do you want to join Improbable?

Bore Place, where Improbable is hoping to make our home, to build a creation centre, is a historic estate of 500 acres that includes an organic farm, group retreat accommodation, education programmes, and more, and it is all on ‘regeneratively managed’ land. That’s what it says on the website. 

Regeneratively.
Regenerative.
Regeneration.

When I was little, that word meant Tom Baker turning into Peter Davison on Doctor Who. 

But back then too, ‘stress’ was something only buildings felt - the pressure exerted on a beam or wall, and ‘sustainable’ wasn’t a term I knew at all, though my brother did ‘sustain an injury’ once playing football, which just meant he had got hurt. 

This week I, and my Improbable colleagues, have been mulling on these words and their meanings, because, sadly for us, our Executive Director is moving on, so we have to face the question of what to do, and the knee-jerk response is to ask, ‘Who can fill her place?’ - Director Who?

The role stays, and the person filling it changes. The person can leave their mark, expand or help shape the role, but essentially, that’s the game. It’s like musical chairs. The chairs stay put and we all dance round them till someone wins - one person gets the gig. I treasured an ambition to regenerate as the first female Doctor Who years before Jodie Whitaker, but I didn’t win that one. 

Yet, now, as we think about engaging in another recruitment process, the whole game doesn’t feel especially regenerative - it doesn’t fill us with a sense of renewal. It doesn’t even feel particularly sustainable. It’s just damn stressful, asking ‘Who? Who now? Who next?’

So, we are wondering what it would be like to take the meaning, learnt from Bore Place, of regenerative management of the land, and apply it to the management of our company.

“To regenerate: To form or be formed again; come or bring into existence once again.” (Collins Dictionary)

Asking this I realise that, as improvisers, our core creative practice is already regenerative, involving as it does a constant process of ending and beginning. Of letting things go, of starting again. And Open Space Technology, which informs all our work nowadays, also invites renewal. It supports people to meet, not in their set roles, but to self-organise around issues of shared concern and passion. Participants are renewed because they are following themselves, what they care about, what brings them alive. It isn’t a game of musical chairs. The chairs in an Open Space aren’t fixed – they move around the space with the people, form and reform into different sized circles as the day goes on. 

So, as our Executive Director leaves us, we want to use it as an opportunity to regenerate. Not like Tom Baker. Or even, like Jodie Whitaker. Instead, we want to see what happens if we regenerate, or reimagine the whole recruitment process, if we focus not so much on filling a fixed role, but on what we care about, what we want to make happen, collaboratively, over the next ten years. Because it’s huge, what we want to achieve. Ambitious. Improbable. And then it starts to feel exciting, to see who might want to help us, and how…

And maybe you can? 

We want to invite you to take part in a regeneratively managed job application. In much the same way as we, and others, are beginning to offer 'pay what you can' options to make our workshops and events more widely accessible, we want to offer a 'do what you can' style of engagement with our work. Let us know what you can do, what it excites you to do, and what makes you want to join us. 

Go here to read more...

Matilda, with Lee, Phelim and Kathryn