Module 2 School for Change Agents - transcript

NHS IQ Webinar (UKNHSI2302A)
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KATHRYN PERERA:
Hello and welcome to module two of the School for Change Agents. My name is Kathryn
Perera, I work with the Horizons team, I am hugely excited to be with you here today. I am a
barrister. I have been a community organiser, I work in healthcare, I am a mum, I am a wife, I
am passionate about leading change for people's lives. I am looking forward to spending the
next 15 minutes or so with you for the main presentation of the session. As ever, in Horizons, I
am joined by a fantastic team of people. I'm going to introduce you to whom we have got on call
today. I'll be leading the session today. We have Helen Bevan with us, who is leading the school
overall. And Pip who will be facilitating the breakout rooms and leading the facilitation generally.
Welcome to Helen and Pip. Please start to access the chat box and interact with the session
and share your ideas and inspirations and stories of change you have been involved in. Olly and
Kate will be monitoring the chat and feeding that in throughout the session. We also have Leigh
and Louis who will be monitoring Twitter. I know there are great conversations happening
through the week and between now and module one. In technical support as ever from Jo and
Paul in the horizon's team.
Welcome, everyone. The whole idea of the School of course is not about me talking but about
the sum of knowledge that we have in the fantastic number of change activists who are on this
call and who are ready to run more together. So it's about building a community of people who
work in health, people who use health services, all of us, connecting and learning with each
other. To make that easier, we are using a hashtag, #S4CA and @sch4change. There are great
conversations happening during the week for School for Change Agents on Facebook. We also
have a Slack group which is fantastic. If there are initiatives going on that you want others to get
involved with, please use the chat box and we will spread the word.
I thought we could start with a quick example of starting with social media that has been used
this week. I love this. "Wow, I didn't know whether to watch the slides, the chat room, or keep an
eye on Twitter." I sympathise with you, Claire, somehow you managed to do all three at once.
"Feeling hugely affirmed and motivated." It's great for us, that is great for us. A lot of the School
is about driving change, and when we work together, great things can happen.
Each week we will cover different aspects of change agent capability. Last week Helen led a
session on being a change agent and how change begins with me. We are going to talk about
that today. I'm going to cover that in our session. How we move from me to we. How we make
connections and build communities to act together and strengthen our ability to act, our power
to make change together.
It is back to Helen next week who will be leading on rolling with resistance. And then the
practical session, what does it mean to make change happen? What are the barriers we are
going to meet? How do we cease to see them as barriers and use them as opportunities to
change and grow. Then we move beyond the end, what does this experience of school mean to
you, individually and on the project you are working on? And how do you make the most of it?
Each week there is going to be a one-hour virtual tour followed by a 30-minute virtual learning
group for those who want it. At about 3:55 I will hand over for that opportunity. If you want to use
the School for the one-hour session, you are more than welcome to do that and to leave us at
that point. I will give you lots of notice of what we are doing and how we manage that handover.

For those of you who would like to collect certification and continuing professional development,
there are a number of opportunities. We seek accreditation with allied health professionals
nurses and midwives. Everyone, if you watch all five of the talks and demonstrate that you have
applied the learning, you can apply to become a certified change agent which is fantastic. It is
free. There will be more information about how you do that in news from Jo.
Without further ado, I want to get started. I am a community organiser, and my first question is
always who are my people? Not what is my issue but who are my people?
And given we are a room of people from the entire world, this question for us is about as
exciting as it gets. I am excited by the energy in the room and the different perspectives that we
have. Here are three tweets that caught our eye this week about the School. The first one is
from Maureen. She says, "Well, I never thought of myself as a boat rocker but if the hat fits..." I
like it. I love this from Vicky. She said don't be surprised if you have an emotional reaction to
what Helen Bevan is saying about rebels and troublemakers. You are not alone any more. This
from Lynn, "You can't be a rebel on your own but changing together is the most important
characteristic."
I'm going to ask Jo to put on the annotation. For those of you who are joining you or haven't
used it before, if you look at the top left-hand corner of the screen, below where it says file, edit,
share, and below where it says Quick Start and session info, you should have an arrow that
points to the right and there are a number of tools alongside that. I'm going to go now and pick
up a pen and I am going to make a mark against the comment that most resonates for me. I'm
going to say, Vicky. Being part of the School can be an emotional journey and the more we
invest in it, the more the emotional resources we tap into can affect us. I can see people are
making marks. Which one resonates? A big circle. I like that. If the hat fits, wear it. Excellent,
and some people are picking up the tools to put their names by it.
This reminds me of a slide I saw in response to a question - "Sum yourself up in three words."
Somebody wrote, "I am a rebel," four words. We have got a full page so we can't see the
tweets. Lots of people resonating with being rebels, not sheep. Thanks, Jo. If you wouldn't mind
switching that off and I will do an erase all. It won't allow me to erase all. That might be for you,
Jo.
There is one final way to connect that I want to remind you of. I know a number of you have
signed up for this already. We are running throughout the length of the School a randomised
coffee trial, that is an opportunity for anyone who is attending the School that wants to be
connected randomly with another person in the School. This is a method of creating
connections, networks and change that was developed by Nesta. They ran a 15-week trial of
the randomised coffee trial within their organisation. They found at the start people tended to sit
in their silos, speak with people in their departments and rarely go beyond those they already
knew by email or the people who were immediately in front of them. By the end of the 15 weeks,
they found there were rich connections across the organisation and the people felt much more
connected with the overall purpose of the organisation and with their ability to influence and
affect change.
We would love you to be involved if you would like to in the randomised coffee trial that we are
running for the School. It is very simple, you just need to email Jo at the Horizon account here.

We will randomly match you with another participant in the School for Change Agents and at
sometime in the next four weeks, you will arrange to have a cup of tea or coffee depending on
your preference - I always go for tea - over Skype. And just connect, talk about whatever you
want. The more times we run this, we tend to find the most surprising connections. I will be
signing myself up as a pseudo-participant. I look forward to having a conversation with one of
you. Now, I want to spend the first part of our session just recapping on some of the learnings
that Helen took us through last week.
You know, I think, for me, this is the heart of what we are going to talk about today. There is a
big difference between being a rebel and a troublemaker.
Helen talked about the most important element of being together. Troublemakers or sole
practitioners or lone wolves as has been characterised will always be limited in their ability to
make effective change. In order to be a rebel, we need to work out ways to combine with others
and to move them to action.
Helen talked us through how successful boat rockers tend to be driven by conviction and
values, have a strong sense of self efficacy. Do we have permission? The question is more,
where are we seeking to get permission from? What is the issue? Permission that is externally
generated or is it our own vision to take and run with the power we already have to influence
change? Successful rockers tend to achieve small wins which create hope and confidence for
other people. They are more likely to see obstacles as challenges to overcome rather than as
blockers to act.
This week we are going to take that learning and move to see how we share a vision of
leadership and how we tell a story. We will ask, "who are my communities?" I would like you to
frame that very broadly. We will talk about public narrative and how it can be used to activate
people around their values. And then we will take some real-world examples and look at how
people have achieved change from positions of small wins.
I would like to start by introducing you to someone.
This is my godfather. My uncle, Michael. Michael was an eye surgeon. He was a very gifted
clinician. He was a quiet man. Thoughtful, very complex. He never married and he never had
children. I guess you could say that my brothers and I were the closest he had to true family. As
someone who lived on his own most of his life, Michael was very passionate about his privacy.
And he was fiercely independent. I remember, as a child, that he would sit me down and say,
"Kathryn, don't depend on anyone for anything. Take care of yourself. Never rely on others for a
single thing."
When Michael was diagnosed with cancer, the thing I think he found hardest was the speed with
which he came to depend almost completely on other people. It didn't sit very easily with him
and I remember that his frustrations would spill over into black moods. He was a doctor, a
clinician, he understood what was happening to him. Almost before he was told. Michael's
biggest fear in his final months was that he would end up in the care home down the road where
he had cared for his own mother 20 years previously. He told me that he remembered it being a
dark place, being very uninviting, very cold. And the idea of him ending up there filled him with
dread. Yet, that was where he went when it became clear that his cancer was terminal, one

week before he died. Except by then it was no longer a care home. It was a hospice.
I remember him calling me from the hospice the morning he was admitted with utter joy in his
voice, and he said, "It is paradise. I had a massage this morning. The chef called me and asked
me what I want to eat for dinner!"
I remember this so clearly. He said, "They have strawberry milkshakes!"
It made me think, in preparing this, that what we all long for when we are at our lowest ebb is
the cold feeling of a strawberry milkshake on a hot day.
What a change between Michael and his mother's experience.
Well, something so simple yet so hard won. A movement of ordinary people, the hospice
movement, who challenged us to think anew about what it means to care for people with
compassion.
I want to suggest to you that the work we are doing here today together is part of Michael's story
because when we learn how to build movements for change with other people, it's the
difference between someone going somewhere to die or going somewhere to live their last few
days with dignity and with joy.
For me, the hospice movement is a strawberry milkshake, my friends, and this week we need to
look at how we can create those movements from very simple starting points, how we move
from me, from my motivation, what I care about, to we, which is the combined power to make it
happen.
You know, Alexis de Tocqueville, when he went to the US, he said something very wise. He
said, "When I look at this democracy, what I see is that knowledge of how to combine is the
mother of all other forms of knowledge, and on its progress depends that of all others."
Let's start our module today by reminding ourselves of the golden rule for change agents: you
cannot be a radical on your own.
What does that mean?
At a basic level, I think it doesn't just mean that we need to learn to work with other people.
It means that we need to learn how to inspire other people to work through us, to work with us
through time, what I would call constancy of purpose, through uncertainty to achieve shared
goals.
To be a rebel, we need to learn how to lead.
This week will be a module in leadership, what it means to be a leader, and it's really important
that I say that the approach that I'm taking to this question of leadership is rooted in some
principles that are as old as the hills. The first time that I know of that they were written down
was by Rabbi Hillel the Elder in the first century in Jerusalem, and I owe a great thanks to our

dear friend at Horizons, Marshall, for talking me through these teachings because they are very
simple but apply exactly to what it is we are working on today.
Rabbi Hillel was asked, "How do I know how to be in the world? How do I know how to
behave?" And he responded with three questions of his own.
His first question: ask yourself, if I am not for myself, who will be for me?
Now, this is not, I would suggest, a selfish question, but it is a self regarding question, a
challenge for us to take our own values, our own resources really seriously, and it has within it
this: if we are going to presume to lead other people to make a change, we had better be pretty
clear what we are about for ourselves.
His second question was this: ask yourselves, "If I am for myself alone, what am I?"
Because to be a who and not just a what means to identify that we live in relationship with other
people.
And more than that, that we exist in the world and our capacity to realise our objectives is
inextricably wrapped up with the capacity of other people to realise theirs.
Third, he asked: "If not now, when?" And this is a challenge, I think, about the time to act. For
me, the suggestion here is if we wait for the perfect circumstance, for everything to be aligned,
to be totally prepared, then we will wait around for our entire lifetime, so action always entails
courage because it always entails uncertainty.
So, when I say this module is about leadership, I mean that it is about the interaction between
those three elements: the self, others and action.
Marshall offers this definition of leadership: it is accepting responsibility for enabling others to
achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty.
Now, for me, the fact that those are questions is also really important in itself.
Rabbi Hillel is not giving us answers. He's saying, "Leadership is less about having answers and
more about posing questions." It is less about knowing and more about learning.
I think this is important and encouraging. Leadership where we create shared purpose with
others is something we can practice and something we can learn.
Last week, Helen said, "Where are people on their change journey?" Some people were giving
us a nine, very confident. Others were maybe a two or a three.
The message that I take from those questions and this approach to leadership is it doesn't
matter. Because by doing we will learn, and by doing we may fail, but
We will do better.

Only by falling off do we learn what balance really feels like.
I think it is also an encouraging way of thinking about leadership because it suggests that being
a leader is not about a position.
Often we confuse the two. We think people in experiences of power are leaders and the
opposite is true.
But if we pause to reflect, if you pause right now and think, is it your experience that people in
positions of authority always exhibit great leadership?
Is it your experience that people in a position of no authority can exhibit great leadership? In
churches and schools and houses, in the home...
If your answer to that is mixed, it suggests that the two, authority and leadership, are somewhat
distinct.
I am now going to hand over to Kate and Olly who have been monitoring the chat box, just to
pick up on what sort of conversations we are having and what some people's initial responses
are to those suggestions.
OLIVER BENSON:
Can you hear me? It works this week! Some really interesting conversations, based on what you
have been talking about.
I think your story that you told touched a lot of people, and lots of people have been responding
to that. Chris Chambers said, "I will try to be as brave as you are in becoming a change agent.
Enjoy that milk shake later."
There are lots of people reflecting with similar views.
And what you have just been talking about now, the quotes and you can't love your neighbours
if you don't love yourself. Comments around leadership. Peter Clayton says, "Leadership is not
a position attained but an influence exercised."
KATHRYN PERERA:
That is a lovely way of saying it. I have been active in campaigns and organising and activating
change for 18 years now, and I always try to challenge myself to tell a new story.
It's important to me, and I think there is a lesson in here for an approach to being a change
agent, which is we should never ask of others what we are not prepared to try to do ourselves.
Even after 18 years, and I'm sure Helen would support this after 30 years, it is always a
challenge and it is always difficult to tell a story for the first time. But it is through that that we
really have the ability to make a connection that is sustainable.
Thank you very much for those comments. I appreciate that.
Now, I asked the question earlier, "Who are my people?" If we want to move from me to we, it is

key. It starts with people, it starts with asking who is it that I am engaging with? And then
spotting the gap in order to say "Who do I want to engage with in future?"
As change agents, we do the work of associating people with others. I referenced Hahrie Han
earlier, and this is her work, referring to lone wolves, mobilisers and organisers. It is important to
spend a couple of minutes looking at the differences.
Once we have asked "Who are my people?", do we know the problem that we need to solve?
Thinking about lone wolves, advocacy, mobilising, organising, all these different models of
making change, when I use the term in this session "Change agent" I'm not referring to
providing services for clients.
"Client" comes from the Latin root inclinate which means to depend on. That is sometimes a
very good thing, but it is not what I mean when I talk about change agency.
When I talk about change agents, I'm not talking about advocating for others. The Latin root,
avocare, means to call to one's aid or to have another person speak for me. Again, that can be
a very good thing, but that is not what I am talking about.
Mobilising is a moment in time, getting people to sign that petition, getting people to show up for
a rally, and that is often a tactic which is very useful but the distinction between that and
organising people to create change together is that organising brings people together for their
own development.
We might well use a tool such as a petition or a moment in time, but the process of building our
capacity together is deciding together that we are going to use that tactic. It's not the tactic itself.
That is a really subtle but important distinction between being able to generate a change and
being able to build an infrastructure for leadership which means people can go on and achieve
change which far outlasts what we are doing here together.
The question, who are my people, takes on a really different feel to it if we look at it that way. It
suggests a very particular way of thinking about people.
I love this quote from Michael Gecan because it sums up the philosophy that sits under much of
this thinking about change. That people who have ideas and drive are on every street in every
project, every workplace and school, waiting in the wings, ready to be discovered. Someone has
to reach them and recognise them. Someone has to ask them to step out, not to be consumers
or props or spectators but to be players in the unfolding drama of public life, and that someone
is what we call a leader or an organiser.
So, when we talk about building a community, one of our key measures of success is not simply
did we attain the goal that we sought to do, but did we in that process develop our people and
build our community?
In this module, we are thinking about community as the coming together of people who have
shared purpose.

If you stop to reflect on your communities, most of us are members of lots of communities.
We've got virtual communities through Facebook and LinkedIn, we've got actual communities
with our family and friendship relationships, face to face.
And most of those communities are built around an emotion at some level. Community means a
sense of belonging.
We talk about community spirit, what binds us together. Typically, the glue that holds us
together as change agents is emotional, and it is value driven.
As change agents, we are in an informal network. It is much more powerful than thinking about
a strict hierarchical model. If you want to create big change then bridge to currently
disconnected groups and it create a power all to itself. It is worth spending some time this week
mapping your communities, mapping the relationships that you have and thinking, how can I
use these creatively? To create an action. Where we have a shared purpose. And where we
don't have a shared purpose, how do I think more creatively about how I craft shared purpose
with others?
It would be lovely if you could use the chat box now to share some ideas of your experiences of
getting this sort of power, this sort of action with other people.
We are thinking about the mapping of strengths and of weaknesses and where the gaps are, in
order to fill them. Mapping is one part of the process. The question is, once we have laid out our
thinking and reflection on where our communities currently are, and on the communities we
want to build in future, what do we do then? How do we reach out to people in a way that will
resonate and that will connect? I want to take you back to Rabbi Hillel and his challenge to us. I
think it was a very personal challenge. In order to get to we, we have to start with me.
The purpose of module one. I love this quote from David White who says, "I do not think you
can really deal with change without the person asking real questions about who they are and
how they belong in the world." This is a question of self authorship, kind of authoring our own
identity as people who want to make change. It is also a question of resources. Thinking of the
experiences that we have inside us as a resource on which we can draw. In order to make
emotional connection. In other words, we cease to be subjects to the things that have happened
to us in our lives and we find ways to make objects.
What I was trying to do with my story about my uncle Michael was to take something which was
a raw experience to which I was subjected and to think about how I could use it to build a
connection with my community, you, here today in order to move you to want to learn more
about organising.
It is that story resource that lies at the heart of how we create collective movement for change. I
love the quote that stories are data with a soul. You know, in a way, it sort of makes sense, the
human stuff is the main stuff. Because if you think of the root of the word "emotion", it is motion,
movement. We often think of great stories and films. And we say, "It moved me."
When we understand people's self-interest, what it is that drives them, we can motivate them to

act. And using stories to access self-interest is a key way to turn values into action with others.
Stories also kind of frame our message so it can be received by other people. They can make
sense of our experience. If you think back to the story I told about my uncle. I could have sat
here and told you that the hospice movement was important and it made a real difference. I
didn't do that. Instead I tried to show you that through the story. In the process of me telling a
story, what I was doing was reviewing something of my own values of what matters to me. I
hope giving you a tiny glimpse of really what makes me tick. There is no shortcut to do that.
Stories provide the means by which we can show that in a way that people can make sense of
for themselves.
I like to think of stories as the second plank, the analysis, the strategy that we absolutely have to
have if we are going to be effective change agents. Because stories get right to the heart get
why we do what we do. That sustains us over time. Narrative emotion, and leading to action.
We started by framing Rabbi Hillel's three questions. When you are looking at your own stories,
this is a structure you may want to use to shape it in a way that inspires action.
The first part of that structure is a story of self. Who am I? Rabbi Hillel's first question. What are
the challenges I have faced and overcome and how do I tell those in ways that resonate with
other people? The second of the three, the question, "If I am for myself alone, then what am I?",
is a story of us. The story of self. Probably the first thing that anyone heard Barack Obama say
when he took the stage in 2004 as a young senator was, "Tonight is an honour for me because,
let's face it, my presence on the stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born
and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, going to school in a tin-roofed
shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant to the British. But my
grandfather had larger dreams for his son..."
Beautiful illustration of the ability to tell a short story of the self that gets right to the heart of
where somebody is grounded in the world. In just a few short sentences. To Rabbi Hillel's
second question, if I am to myself then what am I?
The important thing for here for us as change agents is to reflect on how we create a sense of
shared values. It is not about finding an identical story that someone will have experienced and
then explaining that story to them. It is about finding something that conveys values that other
people can access and articulate for themselves. To take the story that I used at the start, you
know, maybe we have never experienced the illness of a relative. Maybe we have never tasted
a strawberry milkshake.
We can all imagine what it's like to have a cold drink on a hot day and we can all imagine how
that makes us feel loved and it is within that connection that we find the values that creates
common cause with others.
When you are thinking about your stories of us, the way that you connect with your
communities, ask yourself not kind of, why don't people work with me? Why don't people want
to change? Why is this so difficult?
Ask yourself, why would they? Why would people want to make the change? Why would they
want to work with me? Why would this be something that they want to make easier? Starting

from that question requires us to stand back, to listen more closely and to consider the
perspective and the self-interest of others.
The third part of that, the third part of the story is the question of now. What Martin Luther King
called the fierce urgency of now. I think this is one of my favourite slides. I hope some of you are
smiling as you read it. The question is, what makes this moment the time to act?
For me, the important point here is that urgency is a creation. You know, it is not kind of a free-
floating thing which is going around, waiting for the perfect moment for us to engage. All of the
best social movements, the most effective calls to action create the, if you like, framed idea of a
moment for change that feels urgent and necessary to other people.
If you look at the civil rights movement, that was started by a deliberate act of a woman on a
bus, refusing to give up her seat. It was simple but it was also the creation of a point of tension.
That allowed other people to access a bigger story that referred to them. So, please, when you
are thinking about your campaigns, don't wait for the perfect moment, think rather, how do we
create it with other people in order to drive the change that we want?
I'm going to pause their and come to Kate to find out what is happening in the chat, Kate, or
Olly, how are we getting on?
OLIVER BENSON:
Kate, you go.
KATE POUND:
I think people are really resonating with what you are saying about the connection to the story of
us and how it relates to their own situation. A lot, the place is quite fast at the moment.
KATHRYN PERERA:
That is the thing with having several hundred people chatting together at once. The energy is
frenetic, isn't it?
OLIVER BENSON:
Definitely, there are quite a few that I picked out. There was an interesting discussion Dawn
Wilson started when you were talking about the self, it is not selfish to do this. There was also
Laura Wilkes who said this is about about showing your vulnerability, isn't it, opening up to
yourself and others? And Yvonne said I am loving this, stories and experiences are often how
we connect and what we care about each other.
KATHRYN PERERA:
I think the point of vulnerability is spot on. As part of the challenge that I made at the start about
the way that I try to operate as a change agent is always to place myself in a position of
uncertainty, you know? If I'm telling stories that I have told before, then reinventing those
stories, there isn't one narrative that is right. What I said about leadership, not waiting for the
ideal opportunity for that also applies to our stories. If we wait till we have a perfectly crafted
prayer narrative of me as Martin Luther King that is not me. What are the stories at this time that
I can use, even if it is scary, making yourself vulnerable by offering that to other people. I think,
you know, often the side of change leadership is neglected. That we think of it as having a plan

or a position. Or persuading people by reasoned argument.
When actually, what it requires is a degree of courage to kind of push the story through. Was
that another comment? We just got some background noise on one of the calls, no worries.
If you have been sitting there, nodding along but I think, yes, what does this mean in terms of
making it real? I want to do is use some real-world examples so we can break them down and
see how some of these elements apply.
So, you know, if you look at the UK health system, the English health system, there are all sorts
of examples of social movements and collective action that are happening right now.
I have picked out one here. The end PJ paralysis. This is a Twitter campaign started by an
emergency care clinician. It's about reminding health professionals about something really
simple, if you get people into their own clothes and out of their PJs and pyjamas, they are much
more likely to go home quickly. And feel that they are moving, if you like, back into themselves.
There is a great example of a campaign, there are lots of other ones - maternity experience
which is #matx and dementia do - Andy, which is involved in Horizons and other groups, has
done. These are brilliant examples of how you take a relatively small act and the craft stories
around them. So that it's easy for people to access.
One of the best examples that I know of at the moment is the smallest things campaign. I would
tell you a little bit about that and pick out some of the self, us, and now elements. Katrina Ogilvy
started writing a blog called the Smallest Things in 2014. She launched the blog three years to
the day after she brought her son Samuel home from hospital. They had an extended stay there
because Samuel was born prematurely. When they brought him back, it was the day before he
was due to be born. Reflecting through her blog, she thought that she still lived with the
memories of what it was like to become a mum for the first time in an intensive care unit. Even
her closest friends and family didn't really have an idea of what it was that she had been
through. She used the blog as a way of writing a story of self.
Initially the idea was simply to raise awareness, but what she found happened was that as she
made herself vulnerable, as she put her story out into the world, surprising connections started
to come her way and she was able to build a community of mums and dads who felt that her
story resonated with them. Kat became a member of the matX social Twitter campaign and
followed the activities of other mothers and dads. She created a petition to extend maternity
leave of parents for premature babies.
The way she did that was through stories of us. Other mums and dads who had difficult times of
having babies prematurely and all of the challenges that had brought and she started
incorporating their stories into her blog. This got picked up by some journalists.
She mapped her community so she looked beyond just people who were working in health and
thought about her local MP, her counsellors, shopkeepers, who might give support. A printing
press down the road who could produce the stickers that you see on the red book in the top
right image which say I am the mum of a premature baby so I may need extra support. Stickers
that could be put on healthcare notes.

She arranged for her local MP to visit a neonatal unit and meet the mums and support the
campaign and through this, Kat found the catalyst of making this a big campaign which was the
story of now. She realised that if the petition could reach 100,000 signatures, it would need to
be debated in Parliament. She set it up on the Parliamentary website, used all of the press and
connections that were flowing through her work to push the petition and at the end of last year,
they absolutely smashed that target. They now have ministerial attention and a meeting pending
with the minister in charge and they're working further to raise awareness of the campaign for
premature babies of parents' rights. And two weeks ago The Smallest Things registered as a
charity. I was hoping that Kat would join us but she's the mother of two babies that were born
prematurely and childcare wasn't possible. I asked her to share with us what were the three key
things that helped her move from me to we.
She said to keep it simple. Do not try and create a big narrative, even if the issue you are trying
to affect is very complex.
Know the facts. Not your facts, the facts. Know how to use the facts, and understand how those
facts might be used against your arguments to undermine them. Think about what you are trying
to say and what other people's interest might be in response.
This key point about mapping communities. Spend time inking about not just who do you know
that you can influence but who influences whom? In the web of complex relations in which we
all live, what is possible and what can I do?
That is a brilliant example of a campaign, which is ongoing. You can find out more online. It kept
it very simple and brought people into the cause as a result.
I have got about 5 minutes left before we move to the breakout rooms. I want to spend them just
considering two things, which I think are interrelated, and those are success and commitment.
I am always wary of the word "success" because I wonder whose success we are talking about,
but I mentioned earlier that often we limit our own idea of what success looks like by simply
concentrating on whether we achieved the goal that we had in hand. "Did I hit 100,000 on my
petition?" in Kat's example.
I would like to suggest that the functional goal of a campaign is just one part of what we are
looking to achieve.
When we look at success, we need to look at community. Did we grow our community? Did we
create new capacity, new power to act where we didn't have power before?
Finally, individuals. Did we develop the leadership and capacity of individuals to learn, to grow
and to develop beyond this project so they can take this new learning into other actions?
It's the combined impact of all of these three characteristics of success which mark, in my mind,
the most successful social movements. In history, if you look at Dagenham and the equal pay,
the trade union movement, the extraordinary legacy of Doctor Kate Grainger and the "Hello, my
name is" campaign, the hospice movement, matX and a host of other examples, they all

combined these three elements of success, rather than focusing solely on that goal.
The second interrelated point is about commitment.
I really love this quote. It resonates with me. It's very familiar. Staying loyal to what you said you
are going to do long after the mood you said it in has left.
Just to pick up on some of the comments in the chat box. This is not just about concepts. This is
about feeling. Being vulnerable to others and asking them to meet you in a commitment.
Today, I'm asking you, please, to make a commitment to action over the course of the School,
no matter how small you feel that action is, maybe it is getting involved in a Twitter
conversation, sharing a new idea in the chat box or in your facilitated sets, or maybe it goes
beyond that into the outside world.
The pioneering community organiser, who worked in Chicago in the 1950s, said, "Action is to
organising what oxygen is to the body."
"Action is to organising what oxygen is to the body." We need it in order to thrive, keep going
and live. In order to build your own movement for change on the issue you are working with
others on, you have to take that first step, and you have to take it knowing that you might well
fall but knowing that next time you might not fall quite so hard.
So, Olly, I'm going to hand over to you for the technical aspect of moving into the breakout
rooms, and hopefully still have time for a cup of tea.
OLIVER BENSON:
Brilliant, thanks very much, Kathryn. Please pass the ball across so I can move the slide.
KATHRYN PERERA:
I will move the slide along and find you on the list. There you go.
OLIVER BENSON:
Thanks very much. As we have mentioned, this year on the School, we are doing 60 minutes of
formal teaching followed by breakout sessions for those of you who want to do it. We ran it last
week, and it worked.
We had a few teething troubles, and we have tried to fix them, and part of the reason we asked
you to pre-register this year was to allow you to make that process slightly easier.
We are going to take a short break in a little bit to give you a restroom break and an opportunity
for you to grab a cup of tea.
Then what we are going to do is split you into groups.
If you were in a group last week, and you preregistered this week with your break out room
number, you will be transferred there. We had a few people who said that they couldn't
remember their breakout room number or they were not involved last week, so we are going to

transfer people into breakout rooms.
If you didn't register, or if you used an iPad or Mac device which do not have the breakout room
functionality, you will stay in the main breakout room where Pip and Kate will lead a discussion.
Because we had a few questions about how the breakout rooms work, you will be added to a
breakout room. If you want to find another breakout room because you have been put in the
wrong one, all you need to do is, on the bottom right-hand side of your screen, below where it
says "Chat" it will say "Breakout session".
Click on that, and you will see the list of breakout rooms is there. When we start sessions, you
can join the one that you want to.
How do the breakout rooms work? Once you are put in a breakout room, if you get stuck and
you need help, you just ask for help. There is a button in the top right. If the breakout doesn't
seem to be working, you can ask there.
Your facilitator will be in the room. They might need to unmute you, but once that happens, you
can mute yourself again using the button below.
I hope that explains it.
One final word of caution. Occasionally, we have seen instances where the screen share
appears, so we strongly recommend you close other windows you have open on your computer
so your emails or similar don't appear accidentally.
That is the plan. We are going to have a short break to allow you to have a break, and when you
come back, you will be in your breakout rooms.

Module 2 School for Change Agents - transcript

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Module 2 School for Change Agents - transcript