Post Humanism a short genealogy

The project of posthumanism is to decentre humans as the measure of all things, and as a meaningful interpretive unit for understanding the rest of the world. The emblems of the position they reject are firstly Descartes, as he separates thought from the body (and even gives rise to the thought that the material world and body may well not even exist), and the image of the Vitruvian man which quite literally suggests that 'Man' could be the measure and perfect proportions for understanding the world around us.

In the story of humanism, these moments of the 'rediscovery' of man, are moments of transcendence - where truth, beauty and goodness assert themselves over the base inconstancy of the sublunary world. There is a re-writing of the history before as the 'dark ages' and a diminishment of their cultural value or meaning. Then there is the explosion of knowledge of the Enlightenment.

Critics of Humanism and the Enlightenment point of that by centring white, able, European males the movement that gave us the idea of putting human dignity above all, also produced a desire for order and beauty that produced racism, genocide and industrial war in a way that had never been seen before. This is explored by Scotland’s most significant C20th artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, who examines the strange fact that a rage for Arcadian beauty, order and Apollonian calm, generally leads to inhumane violence and intolerance. The image below is a play on Poussin’s picture Et In Arcadia Ego, meaning in paradise is death.

The image below from a work in the Tate, is called the ‘Pipes of Apollo’. The cooling holes of the machine gun, are contrasted to the finger stops on an Arcadian flute played for Apollo the god of order and music in a wood. The series comes from The Third Reich Revisited, a deliberate pun on Brideshead Revisited - a reflection on how nostalgia plays a strong role in extremist pursuits of perfection which end in genocide. This ‘pipe’ was played in the woods during World War II.

Similarly, to the post-structuralists, they noticed that in order to create meaning from the complex, interconnected entanglement of reality, the transcendent approach has a common technique. A verbal definition of identity is formed, then examples and non examples are used to 'split' that which was in fact a genealogically diverse whole, into distinct species. This could be everything from 'civilized and uncivilized' to 'male and female' to 'inside and outside' These binary oppositions form the basis of structuralism that tried to understand them, and post structuralism that tried to point of how contradictory and power laden these dichotomies were. They noticed the way these oppositions and this search for order created everything from social injustice to genocide. Critical post structuralisms abounded for specific groups who worked on a particular set of oppositions - critical feminism, critical post colonialism, queer theory.

Meanwhile in the history of philosophy, a small number of philosophers had been doing something quite different, perhaps deliberately oppositionally, to this way of creating meaning by lifting an element of reality out of the complex whole, splitting it and then using that opposition to create meaning.

Spinoza is perhaps the first in this tradition. Spinoza argues the there is no real value in transcendent meaning. It misses the point that all meaning and 'identity' is in fact immanent within the complex whole of all material. Even God, is not transcendent, but just the fully realised nature of all the material world. Even thoughts are useful only in so far as they full comprehend and match the actual nature of the world around us, and if they do not they are not 'evil' or 'wrong' (which is one half of a binary he wants to avoid making) they are just missing the fullness of reality.

This insistance of positive affirmation, rather than definition by negation in a binary opposition, then resurfaces heavily in Nietzsche's mature works. Deleuze argues Nietzsche is straining for this in his early works, but still relies on binary oppositions like the desire for integration in a whole and the dissolution of self (Dionysus) and transcendent order (Apollo) in the Birth of Tragedy. But in his mature works he rejects the idea of the 'master slave' relationship where identity is formed in a complex entanglement between two people, and instead proposes the superman whose identity is entirely based on positive affirmation and joy. This identity is a complex coming together of elements of the whole, so a particular arrangement of parts, but it seeks nothing but to express itself - just as a particular genetic expression of life is not in 'opposition' to some other imaginary species, but is just an expression of itself.

Deleuze takes these two forbears to help construct posthumanism. He reworks the idea of the 'root' or 'tree' as a model of transcendent thoughts, and replaces it with the idea of a complex whole with multiple positive ways of geneaology asserting itself in new complex combinations. Importantly, like Spinoza, the complex forms are no longer limited to thought, or humans; the complex whole is literally everything in the universe - and hence 'vital materialism' is born.

There is meanwhile a parallel evolution happening in Ecohumanism. In Aldo Leopold's The Land Ethic, before even poststructuralism had begun to question the man-nature split, Aldo Leopold suggested that we could extend our notion of 'Kin' not just beyond our family, and not just beyond our immediate allies and friends, but to firstly humanity in general, from there to animals, and from there to the land itself - which we would begin to see have the same rights and status as humans, as we see in examples from New Zealand where rivers and mountains have been given 'human' rights in some contexts. Althought this 'spreading' of rights from the human, is still very much ecohumanism, its end point is the same - and I am curious of the extent to which the use of the word 'kinship' and 'making kin' in Donna Haraway comes from Leopold, who predates her so significantly.

Where does this take us? In one case this takes us to a place where some mud, has the same value as Michelangelo's David - and biologists might argue, rightly so, given the enormous complexity of microbiological life in a small bit of mud. But when we start to suggest that human suffering is entirely indifferent - and just another example of physical matter - we baulk.

Nietzsche and Spinoza already encountered this however - and whilst both deny evil exists, they have a range of arguments about the importance of joy - which resolutely resist a pessimistic reading. It reminds me very strongly indeed of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, where 'every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you' and he accepts the entire world around him, in its joys and sorrows, with death 'luckier than you thought' - but at the same time, there is no sense of indifference.

Posthumanism takes us to the edge of just such a place Whitman describes and invites us to go inside. So far, it does not describe what you might find there.

A reflection and gratitude note on working at LEGO Foundation

This month a marvellous adventure comes to an end.

I first came across the work of the LEGO Foundation in a workshop with Pasi Sahlberg in Singapore I had signed up to when I was director of Teaching and Learning at UWCSEA. I was curious about constructivist approaches to learning, Finnish education and play as we were moving to a Reggio inspired approach in our elementary school. Pasi shared the five characteristics of play, created in a 2017 paper by the LEGO Foundation and the PEDAL centre at Cambridge University, and immediately it was evident how useful they were. I was totally engaged and chatted to Pasi at lunch. Two years later, I found myself working in Billund Denmark for the same organisation, working in teams with some of the people who had written the words I found so compelling.

In my first months the world suddenly expanded. I was talking to the people whose books I had read, whose organisations seemed as magical and unassailable as Narnia or Neverland - and this happened every day. When I looked at my calendar for the day, it looked like the bucket list I’d have if I had an acute terminal illness and someone was trying to make my last days meaningful for me - Skatestan, Harvard, OECD, leading progressive educators like Agora school, Andy Hargreaves, etc etc.. I got to form networks with amazing practioners I could reach out to - basically gathering my dream list of educators in one place to connect and empower them. The best moments were spending time with Carla Rinaldi at Reggio for a few days of dialogue and exchange. I felt like Plato’s students at the academy sitting under an olive tree must have felt. An intense sense of being in the presence of greatness, both culturally and intellectually, whilst at total peace in a beautiful surrounding.

Reggio Emilia and Carla Rinaldi ‘Play and learning are two wings of a butterfly’

In addition to the intellectual pleasure and ability to make an impact at the Foundation, there was a deep joy in being surrounded by people who created amazing, creative toys. Everywhere on campus there are fun and joyful creations from LEGO and beautiful spaces. A highlight was one of my line managers had designed numerous toys my children had played with growing up. The environment is stunning, with some of the best learning spaces I have ever used.

The work has been extraordinarily varied: designing and developing MOOCs with Futurelearn, designing grants for Teacher Training with the government in Rwanda, an OECD network of schools reaching 1.8 million children, designing the grant for a Playful Schools network in Canada to reach 1.3 million children, commissioning a documentary, holding the partnership with Harvard Project Zero as they complete a book on Pedagogy of Play, developing the grants with Reggio Emilia and Tsinghua, consulting on taxonomies of learning from people like the world bank and OECD, the list goes on… and forming a technical advisory team to provide support to the full portfolio of over 3 billion Danish Kroner. The teaming culture and organisational design is very dynamic and this was both exhilarating and demanding. Moving between seven line managers, six teams, with three role promotions in two and a half years, is dizzying to put it mildly. As I walked into work at LEGO Campus I could see people riding the rollarcoaster of LEGOland from the path - alternately whooping and screaming - it always struck me as apt that this is what I started and ended the day reflecting on.

There has been so much learning. The most powerful learning for me, is having access to major global players in a wide range of spheres, I realised that the same things matter as when working as an educator or school leader, just the scales (and numbers) are bigger.

Just as when I first became a leader in schools, my biggest learning was that what children want from you in class, is the same as what adults want; the same things matter - so too my learning at the LEGO Foundation was that the same principles that are so important in creating learning communities in schools, are the same at national and international scale. Some of these common challenges are:

• Your values should explicitly guide your actions and choices

• Knowing what you mean by learning, is fundamentally important - what is it? why does that matter and improve lives?

• Your mission, vision, goals and strategic plan, should articulate and align with your understanding of learning and your desired impact. This then should align with your approaches, pedagogy and measurement

• Measurement is always via proxies which are very partial, and so you need to take a paradoxical stance of being very intentional about using data to evaluate if what you are doing aligns to your mission and desired impact, but at the same time, never trust those proxies as anything other than a triangulation point for a more holistic sense of your impact, which you should constantly reflect upon, just as a gardener walks their garden everyday to see what is thriving, where and why, and how to intervene if it is not

• Keep your ideas and plans at a high enough level to be very flexible, and adapt for realities, and at the same time be precise enough to allow for craft in implementation

• Systems thinking is fundamental - and causality is not linear - given that, you need rich models for monitoring, evaluation and learning around impact - and these largely need to be developed as the most people still use very linear theory of change models which assume the variable always does the same thing, if you control for context. That is simply not true in systems - the same variable can have opposite effects depending on where you are in cycles of behaviour

• Great leadership is both high in technical craft and the ability to build psychologically safe, high performing teams - and it is therefore by definition scarce

• Knowing your beliefs, values and constructs, helps you to put them aside and listen, create space for and celebrate others’ beliefs and world views. This conversation about power, culture, belonging, inclusion and authenticity is an absolute precondition of good work together and with your partners

I have worked in many environments which have seemed so self-contained in their self-confirmed success, that people there have told me you can’t leave -it’s just too good. That is certainly true of LEGO Foundation - and, it is true, it is a magical place. But, life like a bicycle, does not gain stability from trying to stay still. It gets stability from movement forward, and there are always adventures ahead down the road.

In December I decided that the learning curve had begun to flatten out. In my first month I filled four notebooks with new learning - and in December I looked ruefully at the same notebook I had had for a number of months, with lots of pages still blank. Additionally, the timer I had put on myself for the amount of time I would allow myself ‘out of schools’ before returning was beginning to tick more loudly - there comes a time when you are no longer a legitimate candidate for operational roles, as people do not trust that your pragmatic skills will not have atrophied.

I had two ideals - to be in a home country and to be in an international school there. Bizarrely the first place I looked, the International School of Aberdeen (Scotland’s first and most prominent international school), had precisely the right job advertised in the very week I began to look. I am immensely looking forward to a move to Aberdeen with the family. ISA have a wonderful team in place and just received a truly remarkably good report from Education Scotland (Inverness Press and Journal) , and I feel very lucky to be in a position to help lead the school. Since applying, I have also got to know just how kind and committed the staff are, and what a great culture there is at the school. I am excited to be a part of it, and take a more hands on role in making sure children have meaningful, joyful, iterative, socially interactive and engaging experiences of learning.

At the same time, to continue my learning, I have been accepted to the University of Cambridge’s doctoral programme, where I will commence my doctoral studies researching the play reforms of Education Scotland. Being in Scotland, makes this a perfect combination.

It has been a wonderful few years in Denmark and with LEGO. If play and learning are two wings of a butterfly, butterflies are made to fly, and I look forward to the migration to Scotland this summer.

Creating psychological safety in your team: the prisoner dilemma and Brené Brown's Dare to Lead

Although Brené Brown does not mention it, the prisoner dilemma is a way of understanding her argument in Dare to Lead.  In the prisoner dilemma (the most famous thought experiment of game theory), two culprits are arrested and interviewed separately.  If neither confess they spend say 1 year in jail and then are released.  If they implicate the other they are set free, and the other person gets 20 years.  But the problem is that if they both implicate each other they both get 5 years.  What’s the best thing to do?  Well if you think you can get away with it, have little concern for others’ welfare, and think your accomplice is both kind and stupid, then it is to implicate them.  But the problem is that if everyone behaves like that, everyone spends a lot of time in jail.  The best thing is for both to be brave and trust the other and expose themselves to great vulnerability.

So it is with the world of work.  Everyone at times suffers from insecurity.  Imposter syndrome is very common.  Imposter syndrome is ‘the persistent internalised fear of being exposed as a fraud’ and not deserving of the responsibilities or position one has.  Beyond this we may have many anxieties or needs which we are reluctant to expose to public view out of feelings of shame and inadequacy.

Shame is the feeling that washes over us and makes us feel so flawed that we question whether we’re worthy of love, belonging and connection.  Brené Brown says:

It has two tapes.  Never good enough.  Who do you think you are?  Guilt is feeling I did something bad.  Shame is feeling I am bad. Where shame exists, empathy is almost always absent.  That’s what makes it dangerous.

Signs of shame are:

• Perfectionism

• Favouritism

• Gossiping

• Back-channeling

• Comparison

• Self worth tied to productivity

• Harassment

• Discrimination

• Power over

• Bullying

• Blaming

• Teasing

• Cover-ups

Shame causes us to ‘armour up’ to protect our ego.  If we show we are vulnerable and then someone exploits it, we lose and are emotionally damaged.  But if everyone has to hide their anxiety and carry that burden, then everybody loses.  In this situation everyone struggles with their own sense of inadequacy whilst their core needs may not be met as they are not articulated.  The only long term successful choice is to be brave and vulnerable.

Brené Brown helps us understand the damage armouring up causes.  She shows us ways to lead bravely which surface and lessen fear so that we can all be brave (which means acknowledging that we do indeed feel fear and shame, but this doesn’t have to rule over us) and have our needs met in a high trust, high performing environment, in which we can ‘fail’, reveal our struggles and express our needs but not be judged.

Brown tells us that to get to courage we must ‘rumble with vulnerability’ and ‘embrace the suck’.  Rumbling means leaning into vulnerability and listening. She says that

Leaders must either invest a reasonable about of time attending to fears and feelings, or squander an unreasonable amount of time trying to manage ineffective and unproductive behaviour.

Our ego is an inner hustler and drives pretending, performing, pleasing, and perfecting.  The ego loves gold stars and craves acceptance and approval.  It has no interest in wholeheartedness, just self-protection and admiration.  Our ego will do almost anything to avoid or minimise the discomfort associated with feeling vulnerable.

Our biggest ego threat to our sense of self-worth is shame.

Our ego tries to armour us against the feeling of shame.

Brené Brown then provides a hugely useful T-chart of moving from armoured leadership that is ego-protecting, to daring leadership that embraces mutual vulnerability.

Leaders also make safe containers for their team to explore their boundaries, needs and what ‘permission slips’ they need to rumble with uncertainty. Non-judgemental empathy is a fundamental to vulnerability and daring leadership. We can build grounded confidence to support our daring leadership through rumbling, curiosity and practice: mindful curiosity about our reactions, becoming self aware and engaging in tough conversations.

Living our values and having integrity helps us to be brave.

Brave leadership for rumbling with uncertainty is helped by the 7 parts of the Braving Inventory:

1. Boundaries.  You respect my boundaries and when you're not clear about what’s okay and not okay, you ask.  You’re willing to say no.

2. Reliability.  You do what you say you’ll do.

3. Accountability.  You own your mistakes, apologise and make amends.

4. Vault.  You don’t share information or experiences that are not yours to share.

5. Integrity.  You choose courage over comfort.

6. Non-judgement.  I can ask for what I need and you can ask for what you need.  We can talk about how we feel without judgement.

7. Generosity.  You extend the most generous interpretation possible to the intentions, words and actions of others.

All the above can help us move to a position of ‘calm’.  A mindful balcony view of our, needs, emotions, responses thinking and actions.  We are mindful of stories we are making up (our ‘shitty first draft’), especially stories that “diminish our lovability, divinity and creativity” or that of others and seek to lead bravely without armour.

How to build a technical team: Game theory, Manchester City FC’s league victory and forming the LEGO Foundation’s Learning Through Play technical team

This month saw a spectacularly brilliant Manchester City football team win the English Premiership. The seeds of that victory were laid in the 1970s in Dutch Club Ajax and can tell us a great deal about building an agile, adaptive technical team.

This same thinking we used in forming the Learning Through Play technical team at the LEGO Foundation, and is a highly effective thinking tool for forming your organisational technical teams - whether that is a global insights team in a large educational iNGO or an instructional team in school.

Game theory is usually associated with rather dry mathematical statistical models of how to respond to recursive scenarios in which not only your choices, but your opponent’s choices are interdependent. For a very humourous version of this, the Princess Bride illustrates the point (and it is always good to have an excuse to watch the Princess Bride).

For a more conventional introduction, you might try this. And yes, it does have mathematical statistical tables. It is a fascinating read.

So how does that get us to Pep Guardiola winning five of the last six premier league titles with Manchester City FC and what has that to do with the LEGO Foundation?

The answer is Total Football, probably the most important game theory strategy in the beautiful game.

Total Football is a system of play where any outfield player, can take the role of any other player if they move out of position. (See this video for an illustration). This allows players to instantly adapt and respond to what is unfolding in front of them, without leaving gaps behind as they move. Whilst the team members have notional positions, they learn to occupy any space on the field. The demands of this style of football are very high - it takes intelligent, flexible, technically brilliant players who have the imagination to see how their movement can shape the game. But if you have these players, there is no better way to deploy them. For the opposition it is dazzling to try to keep track of how your opponent will move, or keep track of all the different spaces opening up around you.

Johan Cruyff is the historical figurehead of this style of football, having unprecedented success at Ajax and in the Dutch national team in the 1970s under the banner of playing ‘Total Football’, before moving to Barcelona, where he trained a young Pep Guardiola. In their very first encounter, Cruyff moved Pep into a defensive midfield position, recognising his ability to read and shape the game. After a distinguished playing career, Pep became initially the second team, then the first team coach at Barcelona, where using the same fundamental ideas of total football he won an unprecedented number of titles in the Spanish league. Total football it turned out, was not just an Ajax phenomenon, but a game theory phenomenon.

When Pep moved to Manchester City, the consensus view, was that the technical, intelligent, possession-based game just would not work in the more physical English game. Needless to say, this prejudice was wildly misplaced. Intelligent, agile, flexible teams will work in every context.

When forming a technical team, such as the Learning Through Play technical team at the LEGO Foundation from August 2022, the basic needs make the same strategy high applicable. You need technically good team members who are good at their position - be that early childhood education, policy, research methodologies or pedagogy. You need them to move freely so they rapidly build up experience across a given area. We called ourselves the ‘Bee Team’ both as an inside joke (not the A team, but the second best B team, because if you are the underdog you fight harder), and because like Bees, by going to pollinate flowers, you both cross pollinate ideas across the organisation, and you collect honey (the knowledge that gathers in the hive). But if teammates can only play one position, every time they move out of position you are left with a gap. For example if your Early Childhood specialist takes on a lot of projects, or is ill, then suddenly a big request comes in, you are left completely open and vulnerable. On the other hand, if everyone does ‘anything’ you are missing the concentration of expertise that comes with repeated exposure.

To create the technical team equivalent of total football, we mapped all our work (our evolving positions on the pitch) both on a visual map, and on weekly updates from all team members. We collectively discussed and allocated the flow of requests coming in each week, and ensured that we deliberately both built expertise in specific areas, and also deliberately blurred boundaries. For example, pairing up a positional player with someone out-of-position, or encouraging team members solidly in position to stretch to one new project out-of-position. This means when a team member is over-committed, or fully stretched out-of-position, other team members can seamlessly move into the space left open, and the formation flows into a new shape with no friction. This dynamic movement in and out of position is thrilling in the feeling of perfectly balancing the need for consistency and expertise, with innovation and pathfinding whilst maintaining a strong overall formation.

I have long admired total football as an incredibly powerful idea. I strongly recommend considering it when you form technical teams in your organisation. I would very much like to thank Juliette, Patricia, Tanvi, Ole, Eve, Kathryn, Elisabeth and Cat for being an exceptional team as we did that work together - the strategy only works if you have intelligent, curious and flexible teammates - and that is exactly what they were.

And despite supporting Manchester United, I have to also congratulate Pep on achieving something both highly effective and very beautiful.

What a fictional Ethiopian astronomer and the dancer Isadora Duncan can teach us about learning goals and curriculum writing

Powerful truths can often be best understood and conveyed through fables or stories. Aesop told the story of the fox who could not reach some grapes - so concluded they were probably sour. When we say ‘sour grapes’ after someone criticises something they do not have, a complex set of meanings is invoked.

I often use stories to both express and construct my understanding. One of the most useful stories when it comes to learning goals and curriculum, comes from the story of the Ethiopian prince Rasselas, by Samuel Johnson. Here is how I would explain it.

In the story of Rasselas, an astronomer, is given a mighty office to monitor the night sky and the weather for the king. He begins to write down and track the movement of the planets and moon. He begins to feel that by writing them down everyday he must be controlling them. His belief hardens that if he stops writing them down, then they will stop happening - so he cannot now stop. He no longer trusts that they happened naturally without his help previously.

Milton Erickson, hypnotists and story telling experts will tell you that if you try to explain a metaphorical story too much, you strip it of most of its richness. As Isadore Duncan said when asked what her dancing meant ‘if I could explain it in words, I wouldn’t have to dance’.

But nonetheless, if it is not already obvious, let me explain why this story is so helpful to me when thinking about writing curriculum or helping others to do so.

‘Children can count to 20’… ‘Identify initial sounds’… ‘Identify the relative signficance of an historical event’… Curricula often have hundreds of these statements. I remember working on a science curriculum with 620 of these to be covered in a year and half. Because of course, as curriculum writers if you do not write it down, it doesn’t happen, right?

I remember talking with someone who had spent a vast amount of time articulating all the discrete knowledge and skill that fell under a conceptual understanding. So for example ‘Learners understand that authorial voice is not identical to narrative voice’, would need to be ‘unpacked’ by the curriculum writer into ‘learners understand the complexities of authorial intent’, ‘learners can understand the concept of irony’, ‘learners can distinguish meta-narrative from narrative’, ‘learners can identify tone and mood from narrative text’ ad infinitum.

I tried to help by suggesting that just the understanding itself would do, and then maybe illustrate some examples of what that might look like, but ultimately the rest will either happen naturally as it always has, or the teacher will percieve which knowledge or skills are missing for a specific learner and intervene. But you do not need to write it all down in advance in order for the learning to happen. That can happen in the classroom. The learning goal can be a navigation tool, not a 1-1 map of everything you think the learner will learn. And remember - people learned to do this before the idea of curriculum writing or learning goals existed.

Teachers knowing their craft and subject deeply is invaluable. I am not arguing for sloppy teaching and a lack of intentionality. Teachers being able to identify ‘Ah, they don’t get irony, ok, I can help with that’ is essential. But becoming the astronomer who believes only what they write down happens; it only happens if they write it down; and therefore they must write down everything, is a catastrophic failure of strategy we see all too often.

In an age of curriculum overload, which has got so bad that the OECD has written this report to help countries undo the vast over complication of their curricula, Rasselas, prince of Ethiopia might just have a useful story to tell.

Putting the fish on the table - a Danish lesson in leadership and teamwork

“Don’t hide the fish and make people smell it, or guess how big it is. Just put it on the table, and then we can talk about the fish”

— A Danish Leadership Colleague at LEGO

We know from books like ‘Teaming’ by Amy C. Edmondson, ‘Trust Matters’ by Megan Tschannen-Moran, that psychological safety and trust are basic preconditions for effective teams. I knew this before coming to LEGO Foundation in Denmark, and had always strived to create teams in which these were high, and to do this, I would often talk very carefully around thorny issues.

Coming to Denmark, for the first time, I found myself in a culture that valued directness, as much as trust - in fact, that directness was the basis of the trust.

We all know that you can get directness wrong - and the classic book ‘Non-violent Communication’ talks about the ‘offensive honesty’ people can develop when people first learn to honestly articulate their needs. This is not what we are talking about - rather the non-judgemental, objective and calm expression of what we are thinking or feeling so that we can find common solutions to challenges, or acknowledge personal challenges so we can work together better.

One of my Danish leaders explained it using the Danish expression, ‘fisken på disken’. Just put the fish on the table. If you are feeling or thinking something - do not make others guess what it is, do not give off the ‘smell’ that you are holding something they can’t see, and do not talk about it without just simply putting it on the table where everyone else can see it.

As I settled into the organisational culture at LEGO Foundation I got used to people being straight forward and direct with me, but the first time of trying it myself was a revelation.

A colleague had said, in a room full of Danish colleagues and me, ‘well, international colleagues here are generally more egotistical and arrogant that Danes’. It was just about the worst meeting I had ever been in, and I suddenly felt like a complete outsider being judged as ‘one of them’. But a light bulb moment came with I thought ‘wait a minute, this is Denmark. I am now holding a big smelly fish under the table. If I dare to say it, I think I will get a good response’.

I found an appropriate moment to talk the colleague, and just shared ‘I would like you to know that when you said that, it was a profoundly uncomfortable moment, and I do not think it is a fair generalisation’ and shared a little more of my reaction. The response I got was a turning point in my relationships at work. The colleague was entirely calm, and thoughtful, and just said something along the lines of ‘Thank you so much for the feedback, I can see I should not have said that and apologise’ after having given some explanation of what was going on with them and a particularly bad experience they had had recently, finished with ‘at least it is good that you know I am not perfect, as none of us is. But thank you for just being straight forward about it’

Although a trivial moment, it marked a profound change for me. It was a signal that in this work culture, honesty does not involve ego, or power play, or offended emotions. Mistakes are accepted gracefully and quickly, and we move on. There is a genuine acceptance that directness goes hand in hand with fairness and democracy. If we are all equal but different in our needs and preferences, the only way we are all successful is if we all just put the fish on the table. It does not mean we always get our way, it does not mean we will always be right - but it does mean that conflict is very rapidly resolved, and we breathe clean, fresh air, without the smell of fish in every team meeting.

When forming team norms once I became a team lead, one of the most important norms we agreed on was ‘fisken på disken’, and it is one of the most used. People will often preface a contribution with ‘fish on the table, I am worried we are doing the wrong thing here…’ and what follows is a remarkably honest and collaborative team dialogue.

There are many different ways as a team you can build the norm of speaking directly and honestly in order to build trust and efficacy - but I do recommend the ‘fisken på disken’ as a very effective metaphorical way of helping a team feel comfortable with directness.