[I participated in the UK Civil Service Senior Leaders’ Scheme (SLS). Each time I attended an SLS workshop I tried to express something of what I learned in the form of a blog. These are not written for publication. They are often partial and tangential. This is the blog I wrote after attending the Power workshop in 2018.]
We all have our reactions arriving at Ashridge.
“It’s Downton Abbey!” Or maybe Brideshead? Hogwarts is perhaps the most common. There might be some value in exploring that association: it is where magic happens and where the wizards of the future are trained. Julian as Professor Dumbledore. Lots of fun ensues. Who’s Harry? Hermione? Perhaps most fun: who’s Snape? Draco?
However, for me, when pulling up the long driveway I don’t imagine myself on the Hogwarts Express, rather I am arriving at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. Gifted? Maybe. Youngster?? Hardly (however it’s notable just how young and gifted many of those arriving at Ashridge actually are these days. That can only be a good thing). Anyway, Ashridge as the X-Mansion, base of the uncanny X-Men. Julian as an analogy-bustingly mobile Professor X. Who’s Wolverine? Beast? Storm? Too niche? Google it.
Of course, these sorts of associations – what’s evoked by what you see, hear, smell, taste and feel – are always deeply personal. The sorts of connection are not always logical or even explicable. “I don’t know why I think that?!” Even if there is an explicable connection maybe there’s nothing more to say: Ashridge just looks like a big fancy house where learning happens – Hogwarts or the X-Mansion are big fancy houses where learning happens. QED. Is that it? Maybe but let’s see if we can push the analogy a bit further.
The arcs of the Harry Potter stories and your typical X-Men story are basically the same: individual enters place of learning with huge potential but is confused about that potential, unaware of its scale, and is reluctant to wield the power they have, but when that power is finally revealed . . . wow! Nothing less than the triumph of good over evil. The world is changed forever.
Reluctance, humility and vulnerability are critical to this – I doubt the series would have been anywhere near as successful if it had been Draco Malfoy and the Philosopher’s Stone. Of course there needs to be an arch-villain, a bête noire, but actually in many senses the greatest risk to the hero transformed is the hero themselves. Too reluctant, the opportunity is missed. Too brash, one over-reaches. We remember that Icarus flew too close to the sun but his father Daedalus warned him that flying too close to the sea was just as risky. Too much humility, we under-reach.
Perhaps something of the genius of Freud was the sense that in many ways the villains out there in the real world – Magneto and he-who-must-not-be-named – are as much projections of our inner world as really out there: the cowards, the braggards, the psychopaths . . . that make up our inner voices. Maybe that’s just me? Seems not. The simplified Freudianism of Transactional analysis, with the Parent/Adult/Child, is a more homely typology of inner voices, representing every bit as much of a battle than between the hero and her bête noire.
Of course, sometimes the demons are actually out there. Maybe it’s a real person who’s holding us back, standing in our way: the arrogant hubristic leader who uses their skills not for good but to win the (political) game. Sometimes it not a person at all, maybe that demon is world hunger, poverty, racism. Knowing what battle you are fighting and against whom is pretty important.
For me though the most important fight is the one I am (always) fighting with myself. It’s what often causes the greatest pain and fear, but it is also the wellspring of my power. That’s the inescapable tension at the heart of all these great myths – whether Harry Potter or Shakespeare – and why they speak so powerfully to us.
Unless we have that sense that to release our true potential we need to fight our cowardly, arrogant, selfish, frightened selves we are missing something not just important but essential. Maybe it doesn’t always feel like a fight maybe sometimes more a negotiation but my sense is that negotiation is often too rational. The bits that drag us down, the doubts and fears, are visceral and deeply emotional and not talked away. For me, my Magneto, is anxiety, self-doubt, imposter syndrome. I am more or less constantly fighting it, seeking to silence the voice(s) that deny me my power. It’s different for all of us.
This is where Professor X and his school for Gifted Children comes in: a safe space/container for the (inner) struggle to play out and to be taught tools and techniques by wise tutors. To try and fail without that costing everything. To be with others in the same position, to form a bond with those also struggling (with themselves) and to sometimes rely on them to take the full weight (“Let me carry the burden Mr Frodo”, says Samwise Gamgee).
It would be wrong not to credit our wise teachers, Julian above all, with a crucial role in unlocking our potential. But I think about a comment made in the friendship circle at the end of the Power workshop: “the power is here in our network”. Indeed. The structure, the tools and techniques, might well come from the faculty, from Professor X and the others, but the energy, the power, comes from us, a collective of friends pushing the boundaries of their potential and fighting their demons in a safe space with each other’s back.
So far so good but also so generic. My association with the X-Men goes a wee bit deeper than that. In particular it’s in the fact that I see our power more in terms of mutation than magic (or the Force, the one ring, Gamma Rays . . .). Our power of transformation is our potential for mutation.
This is in part to recognise it’s something about genetics. I think there is a role here for actual genetics but actually all of this talk of genetics and mutation is more metaphorical than that. Thankfully I don’t actually see our power for transformation resting in an actual “permanent alteration of the nucleotide sequence of the genome of an organism, virus, or extrachromosomal DNA or other genetic elements”. Whether we have it or not is not an accident of birth (although structural inequalities certainly make it harder if you don’t look like me).
But we can perhaps learn something about our power for transformation by imagining it as a form of mutation.
Even within the metaphor, the sources of mutation are resolutely epigenetic, that is to say changes in my outlook, approaches, beliefs caused by my interaction with my environment. That environment – physical, social, organisational, cultural – can both cause (catalyse) and then feed or starve the mutation. One of the epigenetic conditions of personal power and transformation is being in and part of a safe, supportive network of friends with the support of great teachers. The true power of the Senior Leaders Scheme.
The trick though is to ensure that the epigenetic factors in the wider world, away from the safety and comfort of Ashridge, cause and amplify the mutation, rather than suffocate it. Too much unproductive politics and game playing may well stifle true transformation rather than encourage it, even if one feels one is thriving.
But what mutation are we talking about? Shooting laser beams from our eyes? The power to control the weather? Read minds? Of course, metaphorically, all these things and more. But the mutation that matters is whatever change, preferably permanent but rarely final, that brings about the power of personal transformation.
And through that personal transformation establishing the conditions to achieve great things, acts of powerful good that would in any sense be worthy of the description “superpower”. Really? Imagine the power to create a more humane social security system, to the benefit of millions. Imagine, equally, a health service that engages proactively with people rather than treating patients, that transforms the lives of millions. And so it goes on.
These are the things at stake. We have a moral duty to do the work we need to to overcome our demons and to thereby release our power to transform for the sake of the common good.
As uncle Ben Parker reminded us, “with great power comes great responsibility”. So when I look around the room at Ashridge I see this potential power and I feel that responsibility. The responsibility to beat my personal Magneto and to help you do the same.
Maybe we are more like X-Men than we might ever have imagined? Now if I can only get Julian to shave his head.
Rough Ground 