So, You Want to Change the System from Within?

Beware, the host organism will attack its "imaginal cells."

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Survival Tool #42: Be Aware of Your Host Organism

Preparing for my interview for the role of climate correspondent at Reuters in early 2019, I recalled a marketing maxim I must have imbibed among the prodigious quantity of self-help literature I’d consumed over the preceding decade:

“Don’t give a talk, put on a show.”

So I created a PowerPoint, complete with story ideas, explanations of climate tipping points, a breakdown of key climate events in the year ahead, and a brief video clip showing a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis.

This finale was supposed to illustrate my theory that it was the media’s duty to find and platform the climate equivalents of “imaginal cells” — dormant biological building blocks nested in the body of a caterpillar that wake up and start to self-assemble as the creature enters its tiny death throes.

It is these cells that repurpose molecules from the insect’s rapidly-liquefying innards to build the body, wings and legs of the butterfly that will emerge shimmering from the chrysalis.

I wanted to convey to the three editors in my interview panel the idea — or at least faint hope — that even as our current systems break down, self-organising networks of change agents are starting to build communities that could ultimately sustain a radically transformed world.¹

But, I posited, few journalists had noticed this potentially crucial development because the legacy media — staring through prisms shaped by the economic system it serves — simply wasn’t looking in the right places. Not only were journalists not looking in the right places, they didn’t even know such places existed.

As a news agency that boasts of reaching more than a billion readers a day, Reuters could set itself apart — I ventured — by actively searching for these “imaginal cell” individuals, and telling everyone about what they were doing. Our survival — the lives of the people sitting around the interview table — might depend on it.

Despite all the above, I got the job.

It didn’t turn out the way I’d envisaged.

Within a couple of years I’d quit the company for the third and final time, disillusioned by the gap between what I’d imagined might be possible, and what actually happened. (Survival Tool#38: Reflect on Your Life’s Larger Themes).

Flummoxed

At one level, I’d quit because I’d realised that Reuters had no real interest in the kind of climate accountability journalism I felt it was the company’s duty to pursue with all the vigour, expertise and competitive spirit its battalions of hundreds of financial reporters apply to the task of charting the gyrations of global markets. (Survival Tool#32: Processing my Reuters Climate Karma).

But there was more to the story, and it’s only with the benefit of several more years of reflecting on that tumultuous period that I can see more clearly what might have actually been going on.

The fact that I’m still integrating this experience was unexpectedly brought home to me last week, when I was interviewed for an initiative providing resources to support climate journalists to build psychological resilience. (More on that next year in Toxic Workplace Survival Guy’s sister publication

Resonant World

).

The interviewer asked me about my experience at Reuters, and why I’d left.

I found myself unusually flummoxed by a question that — thinking through the interview during the journey to the studio — I’d assumed I’d ace.

The fact is, I didn’t want to tell a victim story — because I don’t feel like a victim.

Though I experienced one of the most stressful periods of my working life during that last tour at Reuters (way more stressful than working in Baghdad or Kabul) due to the toxic workplace dynamics, I can also see that I had by that time become — as my late mother used to say — “a round peg in a square hole.”

Unlike most of my colleagues — and bosses — I’d taken the “green pill.”

Visceral Grief

In the week before starting my role as climate correspondent, I’d attended an event known as the Climate Consciousness Conference in Findhorn, a long-established intentional community in Scotland. I’d connected deeply with the visceral grief I carried over the devastation of the natural world, and the horrible death and suffering humans are reaping as a consequence. I sat in the garden that forms the spiritual core of Findhorn and wept — for the whole sorry mess; the dashed hopes of myself as a little boy — who’d been fascinated by the now dying Amazon and coral reefs; and the ecological catastrophe that had accelerated so dramatically during my lifetime. (In one of those totally unanticipated twists of fate, last month I ended up co-hosting an online Climate Consciousness Summit with Kosha Joubert, co-host of that in-person conference in Findhorn in 2019).

In short, by the time I arrived at that Reuters interview, I had persuaded myself that I had a better appreciation of the truly desperate straits we’re in — and how that reality lives in our bodies, mostly below our conscious awareness — than anyone sitting around that table, politely watching my slides.

And — forgivably or arrogantly, depending on how you look at it — I felt that it was my job to try to use my role to do something about the situation, or at least respond with whatever dignity looks like for a corporate journalist under late capitalism.

I found all this hard to capture in a pithy way for the camera during last week’s interview, which is why I’m writing this post.

Creative Chaos

It’s only now that I can see clearly that when I showed up at that Reuters interview, deep down I wanted to be an imaginal cell.

I hadn’t yet been able to admit to myself that I harboured that impulse.

But the video I was showing the editors was a kind of fantasy self-portrait.

I wanted to help midwife the emergence of a civilisation-scale butterfly.

I wanted to be an agent of change.

And I wanted to team up with other agents of change and salvage something out of the disaster that I imagined most (though not all) people in the Reuters newsroom were either too exhausted, dissociated, depressed, or overwhelmed to ever allow themselves to engage with deeply enough to feel compelled to demand that we focus our enormous resources on exposing the vested interests blocking climate action needed to avert catastrophe.

Because if myself and the company’s other 2,500 journalists had really acted as if the warmings delivered each year with ever greater desperation by climate scientists were true, the newsroom’s output would have looked very different — no more soft-soaping of the fossil fuel industry, aviation, agriculture and other major polluters; a determined push to catch up with rival Bloomberg by embracing serious climate investigative journalism; and an end to sponsored content deals with oil and gas companies, for starters. (Resonant World#58: 50 Reasons Why Reuters Should Stop Working for the Fossil Fuel Industry).

And the kicker is this:

As the imaginal cells in a caterpillar begin to activate and connect with one another — working towards a stunning transformation that no individual cell can possibly conceptualise, even dimly — the dying organism’s immune system coolly initiates its attack sequence.

Because the imaginal cells are interpreted as a threat.

A battle ensues. Creative chaos. Outcome uncertain.

Sometimes, the imaginal cells are snuffed out before the butterfly gets built.

I recognise now that I was too naïve, too unintegrated, and too mis-attuned to have had a hope of changing Reuters from within, even a tiny bit.

I was still in thrall to a part of myself that thought I knew what should be done, and I probably pissed more people off than was necessary or wise. I’m looking at you, world desk.

(If you’re one of those people, message me — let’s have a coffee, on me).

Was it a mistake to try?

Find the Others

I don’t think, given my level of development at that time, I could have acted any other way.

But I do know that I feel my imaginal capacities firing an order of magnitude faster now that I’ve broken out of the soul-corroding confines of the Reuters block in Canary Wharf. (Survival Tool#35: Reclaim Your Inner Authority). Being the odd one out takes a lot of energy, as does fighting the corporate equivalent of white blood cells.

What’s the survival lesson here?

Know what you’re up against. Understand your host organism. Acquire a capacity for self-regulation, relational precision and basic competencies in recognising and working with trauma (your own, other people’s, and at the organisational level). Go slowly. Listen more. (Survival Tool#26: Become Trauma-informed).

Above all, find the other imaginal cells.

The biggest mistake we make in trying to change systems is falling into the trap of thinking that we can do it on our own. (Resonant World#69: Forward This When Words Fail).

And I can guarantee that there will be some amazing fellow imaginal cells at the workshop climate psychologist Steffi Bednarek and I are hosting at The Conduit in London this Saturday for professionals conflicted — as I was — about their organisation’s response to the climate crisis. We still have a few spots left, so if you’re interested, you can find details and book here.

We called the workshop “Should I Stay, or Should I Go?” to reflect the dilemma I spoke about in a video of the same title in July last year, based on my Reuters experience. (Resonant World #35: Should I Stay, or Should I Go?).

I very much hope that Steffi and I will see you there.

(And I promise — no caterpillar videos).

Summary

If you’re are an imaginal cell, the host organism will attack you. Find other imaginal cells — inside the organisation or beyond its walls — and start building the butterfly, together.

I consult on surviving toxic workplaces; and can also help you navigate your toxic workplace via the Tarot. Click here to inquire:

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I write Toxic Workplace Survival Guy during my spare time from working as an editor at nonprofit climate news service DeSmog (a model workplace). Subscribing, sharing, liking, commenting or buying me a coffee helps make this project sustainable. Thank you!

1. It might have been four.