1.01: Reflections: What matters?

In episode one, Tim and Tuesday kick off with a lively conversation on what matters most as change makers push back — on broken systems, missing voices, and the status quo. 

SHOW NOTES

First up, we introduce ourselves, talk about our work—who we are and what we do—who are these voices in your ears? Then, we raise the deeper questions we’ll dive into in the coming months: key building blocks and obstacles in the shared work of equity and systems change.

• THE POINT OF PODCASTING: This podcast is a pause to let what we’re learning settle in. Talking and thinking out-loud—inviting other people in—to capture and share insight. Tim riffs a spoken word poem about reflection being too important to leave to chance.
• THE ROOTS OF OUR WORK: What about how and where we came up in the world made us? Tim and Tuesday recap their origins in the world—class, education, geographies, cultures, careers, ethnicity—equity!—and how all this shapes who they are today (and how they work together).
• PARTICIPATORY LEADERSHIP: Participatory leadership as a driving force when we realized how much was missing from solutions. Understanding power, privilege, race, gender—pulling all these impacts together to change systems that might make the world better. It’s not just personal. It has to be bigger than us as individuals.
• RETHINKING PRIVILEGE: Let’s do a whole podcast about the word ‘privilege’—even though it’s so heavily used these days, we almost want to return to it, and rethink how it fundamentally informs our work.
• ALIGNING LIFE EXPERIENCE TO STRATEGY: How do we align our basis for processing the world—our strategic brain, which comes with all kinds of assumptions and patterns rooted in our life experience—with a new sort of bigger-picture strategy that has to get beyond the typical? How do we navigate our relationships across time to keep us moving on-strategy, while staying in-relationship with each other?
• INFLUENCING FACTORS ‘IN THE ROOM‘: Tim and Tuesday explore various positive and negative influencing factors in ‘running the room’ when they’re experimenting towards systems change: generosity, that just-enough mentality, privilege.
• WORK-LIFE BALANCE: The psychology and effect of work-family balance as our work scales up: how can we make sure that as our success grows—as we scale our work to the next level—how can we be sure we’re not exhausted by it to the point where we’ve not got enough for our families?
• BUILDING A CAN-DO VIBE: How can we acknowledge a persistently difficult reality while also uplifting the room?
• SEEING REALITY CLEARLY: What it means to bring a willingness to see reality into the room. Not just conceptual clarity, but also being clear on how much we don’t know. What’s the value of knowing how much we don’t know?
• WORKING TOWARDS A SOCIETY THAT SERVES ALL: Why does this principle somehow feel like ‘milk toast’, as Tuesday calls it? Important, but somehow bland. ‘Serves all’ becomes a blanket that can muffle clarity. Equity is not just addressing marginalization, but also building something that every person in the system, across power lines, actively benefits from. Not just ending lack of benefit but creating benefit. We’re radically committed to this idea, but we need to make sure that when we talk about it, it’s not a throwaway line.
• EPISODE 1 SONG: Damn, dis-moi by Christine and the Queens

Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at podcast@findtheoutside.com.

Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.

Duration: 40:26

Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good Studios

Theme music: Gary Blakemore

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