Everything is Changed

A dozen democratically oriented gifts from a monthly huddle

The insightful author Allegra Hyde wrote in Lit Hub back in the winter of 2022:

A great first line can spur intense readerly attraction—provoke a compulsion to know more. Let’s call this: love at first sentence.

Opening lines, reflections on writing, references to Romanian fairy tales, a British anarchist folksinger, a famous free-thinking French author, an acclaimed American historian, a contemporary Russian dissident, the value of open book finance, come together below to deliver a whole bunch of great conceptual holiday gifts for anyone who’s interested in enhancing the health of their organization.

All that and then some is here, in the essay that follows. It could, I know, sound strange, but if you’re willing, curious, or both, stick with me for a bit.

Let me start at the beginning.

Anyone who writes regularly—or for that matter, reads often—knows that the opening lines Allegra Hyde has alluded to have an outsized impact on an essay. Most writing, by hierarchical definition, has one opening line. This piece, perhaps more inclusively, has a baker’s dozen of them, spread out and marked throughout the essay. I have moved the pieces and paragraphs around aplenty and landed on the way it is, but, really, all would work well as traditional first lines. Rather than get caught in the usual rules of writing, then, I just decided that in the spirit of anarchism, equity, and the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB) huddle I’m writing about, to include all of the voices in the “room” without getting too hung up on hierarchy. If we can have close to a hundred people come together for the gathering at which we run the organization and do it with grace, goodwill, mutual aid, dignity, and positive coexistence, I don’t see why multiple first lines can’t do the same.

With that said, here’s the second of the opening lines. It’s a great one to put on your wall or your screensaver. It comes from my friend, the Irish writer Gareth Higgins:

When you encounter a story, ask yourself, “Is this story true, and is it helpful?”

The answer to both questions here is a very enthusiastic “yes!” What follows is indeed all true. I hope, too, that it’s also hugely helpful. For me, it’s so true and so helpful, in fact, that I shifted away from topics I’d previously intended to write about this week to bring you what we might consider as the happy and healthy equivalent of headline news here in the ZCoB.

To be clear, there’s no drama in the details that follow. What you will find is the result of a whole lot of good work, done by many hundreds of people over a period of probably 30 years or more! Out of which, over the course of three hours of our monthly huddle last week, a long list of great, very practical gifts of organizational design is embedded.

The huddle commenced at 9 am last Thursday in the larger of the two training rooms at ZingTrain. Facilitator for the morning, Elph Morgan, called us all to order. Before the meeting really commenced, though, everyone present quickly introduced themselves to get each person’s voice in the room. In the spirit of which, here’s a third, and very lovely, opening line. It’s a quote from one of my favorite books of all time, Why the Bee Is Busy, and Other Romanian Fairy Tales, published in 1939 and penned by Idella Purnell and John Weatherwax. When I first read the line a decade or so ago, I went back and reread it about 10 times in a row to really get its full implications. It still makes me smile all these years later. And I’m reminded of it every time something sort of magical happens, something that seems like it will be beyond belief for more cynical leaders. Something like last week’s huddle. At the start of the book, the authors share this atypical take on the way so many fairy tales begin:

Once upon a time what happened did happen, and if it had not happened, you would not be hearing this story.

The story I’m about to tell is, as I’ve already alluded, about the 80-plus people who convened for that monthly huddle last Thursday. In a moment when headlines are dominated by bluster, brutality, conflict, indignity, exclusion, a drive to divide, and, increasingly, verbal and physical violence, this was very much the opposite. It was both impressive and inspiring. It was also a wonderfully peaceful, nonviolent act of inclusive coming together to work on any number of issues at hand. The compassion, interest, empathy, kindness, and dignity I witnessed there left me in awe. (Something similarly special, I remember, happened about 18 months ago—you can read about it here.) The group’s wisdom, powers of self-reflection, and ability to work together all felt like a gift. It sort of seemed like some kind of organizational Santa arrived at work a couple of weeks early and left an array of gifts under our metaphorical tree. Not gifts for me, but gifts to be shared here so that you can, if you so choose, adapt them to your workplace in creative ways. They are things that, I realize, have come together to make what we do here in the ZCoB work the way it does. While that morning felt magical, the gifts themselves are quite practical. They can be implemented nearly anytime and by anyone who’s committed to doing the work to make them happen.

Speaking of unexpected gifts, I was already pondering the concept of momentum after what I wrote last week and reflecting on the power of writing first lines, when I came upon a 2001 conversation between writer George Plimpton and poet Billy Collins in The Paris Review. Plimpton, conducting the interview at the time that Collins served as the Poet Laureate of the United States, asked him to explain the genesis of his poems. As soon as I read the piece, I knew that Collins’ response, which is about opening lines, could have been another darned good starting point for this essay. (If you’re keeping score, that’s #4). Collins explains:

Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times—and this, I think, is a sense you develop—I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum—the poem finds a reason for continuing. The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. … the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with. You’re trying to discover something that you don’t know exists, maybe something of value.

In this case, what I discovered last Thursday morning are, in a sense, things that I already knew well—after all, we’ve been huddling here for something like 30 years! Billy Collins, though, got me thinking about what we do in a whole new way. And although I had other topics penciled onto my writing docket, I left the ZCoB huddle so energized that I couldn’t help but reflect, connect, and then write about what I learned in an effort to share the truth of the story and be helpful about what I shared.

I could have easily, I know, completely missed all these lessons. After all, this was the 15th ZCoB huddle we’ve held this year, and I’ve probably been to about 300 of these huddles over the years. It would have been easy to just go through the motions. I’m glad I was more mindful. In the context of which, here’s another good opening line. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk and peace activist, offers this:

Mindfulness is the energy that helps us recognize the conditions of happiness that are already present in our lives.

Early Sunday morning, in what would also have been yet another way to open this essay, marketing guru and author Seth Godin posted a short piece about the problems that come from taking things for granted:

We don’t notice that the tree we planted a few years ago thrives just a bit more each day. We don’t notice that the mail shows up when it’s supposed to, that our civilization persists in the face of chaos, and that the lights (usually) go on when we flip a switch.

…

What would happen if we paid as much attention to these persistent delights as we pay to the annoying surprises that unfold each day?
The narrative of our time here becomes our lived experience.

All of which fits well with my focus this week. It’s a narrative of my lived experience of last week’s ZCoB huddle. The main point for me, woven into all of these inspiring opening lines, is that the huddle is, in its ever-imperfect form, a very real example of the kind of real-life, down-to-earth, and democratically oriented organizational practice that so many people in this country are seeking.

While we can’t wave a magic wand and change what’s happening in Washington, we can absolutely alter our organizational design to weave more democratic practices into our daily reality. In the course of three hours, the huddle offered a host of ways any workplace—from Congress to a corner store to a local cafe—could be a more positive, engaging, and effective place to be a part of.

For anyone, me included, who feels the tension of seeing the country shift away from democratic practice in the U.S., I would suggest turning to the insight of Nadya Tolokonnikova. Tolokonnikova spent the first 25 years of her life living under Russia’s repressive autocratic regime and is one of the women who came together in Moscow to found the performance art group Pussy Riot in 2011. At the time, Tolokonnikova was 22 years old. The following year, she was arrested and spent nearly two years in various Russian prisons and labor camps before being released into freedom in the West. Given her lifetime of experience fighting with autocracy, Tolokonnikova recently offered Americans both a warning and an opportunity, a bit of chronological context, and for me, another possible opening line:

You are in a beautiful moment when under pressure, you can produce beautiful art. … [B]ut you have to understand that there will be a moment when you won’t be able to do all this stuff.

If we are indeed in that first moment, the beautiful one, then down-to-earth democratic practices are a lot of what we need to make a positive difference. The ZCoB huddle was just that. It is, in the best possible way, a collaborative act of beautiful organizational art. Rather than being mostly about the wishes of one autocratic leader, as so many companies would make it, this was all about the group. What we did, we truly did together.

Which reminds me about a recent interview historian Timothy Snyder did with journalist Jessica Yellin on News Not Noise. In it, Snyder offered me yet another first line when he said:

You can’t change [the world] by yourself. You can only do it in an organization.

Which is, sure enough, what the huddle reminds me. Whatever I might make happen on my own, it pales in comparison to the power of the group—in this case, close to a hundred of us who huddled together—that made it possible. Any of us, of course, can make a difference on our own. But what we can accomplish together goes far beyond any ability to achieve individually. What happened here last Thursday is a model for what might happen anywhere! It’s not the sort of work that most Americans experience, but, as per what Why the Bee Is Busy tells us, what happened really did happen, and if it had not happened, you surely would not be hearing this story.

Last week’s ZCoB huddle reminded me of the goodness that is possible in the world, even if most of the world is looking the other way. Here are a dozen great gifts that I took away from that three-hour gathering. Pick, choose, adapt, and use as you see fit. All, I believe, can be of great organizational value! Each can serve as a good opening line for organizational change and the work to enhance the quality of your culture. One item on this list will likely have to go first for you, but it won’t make the other openings into organizational improvement any less valuable:

1. It happened! Consistently conducted meetings and organizational rituals have far more power than most people realize. Ideas are easy. It’s the implementation, effective and practiced over extended periods of time, that really makes things happen. Regularly repeated practices like the huddle offer very little drama, but they are a big part of making positive organizations what they are. British folksinger Billy Bragg, after attending a pro-democracy rally in London not long ago, drove home this point: “You don’t just do it one afternoon and then you’ve done your bit. You have to carry on and keep on pushing.” Just keeping the ZCoB Huddle going as long as we have (for about 30 years in various forms) is no small feat. The fact that it has gotten better over the years is even cooler. Our huddles (in rudimentary form) started with eight people meeting, and we didn’t even call them “huddles” yet. But, as you can tell, they evolved. In yet another possible opening to this essay, the amazing author Suleika Jaoud wrote this on the subject of conscious repetition in a recent Substack:I’m endlessly fascinated by what accrues when we commit to something tiny, daily, and ours. A practice doesn’t need grandeur to be transformative. It just needs to be repeated.I am confident that the same power can be manifested in any event that’s made to happen regularly. The huddle is really a ritual, the one regularly occurring event where the ZCoB gathers! It is not particularly grand, but I was reminded this past Thursday that it indeed is powerfully transformative.
2. Great facilitation. As I wrote in my piece on meetings a few months ago, having a skilled facilitator at a meeting (especially a big one like the ZCoB huddle) is hugely helpful. Making it someone who is not the boss is valuable. It made an enormous difference in our organization when we started to separate meeting leadership from meeting facilitation many years ago. At the ZCoB huddle last week, Elph Morgan, our multi-talented, longtime IT director, ably facilitated the meeting. There’s actually a whole team of five or six folks that facilitate at various points. All have other, much bigger roles in the organization, but still, they make time to meet regularly to review the huddle, share learnings, talk about things they want to do better, and more. Granted, we’re a bigger organization, but just having someone who’s not the boss facilitate is a big deal on its own. It moves power around the room in a wonderful and important way.
3. Open meetings. Something like 25 years ago, we switched our default mode for who we include in meetings. Rather than follow the usual routine of keeping meetings closed, with only those who needed to be there in attendance, we began to default to meetings being open unless there was a compelling reason to keep them private. As a result, the ZCoB huddle, which was originally limited to partners many years ago, has long been open to everyone who works in our organization. It could be their second day, or they may have been working at Mail Order for just two months, but they’re still welcome. We pay them to come (and there’s food!), and they are encouraged to actively participate!
4. A diverse group of participants makes for a more positive meeting. Despite current headlines out of Washington, the reality remains that in nature, the healthiest ecosystems are the most diverse. It is, of course, equally true in organizations. The huddle demonstrated, once again, the beauty of all that. This was a really diverse group! Many at this gathering have been with us well over 20 years, but there was also someone there who just started three or four weeks ago. There were a fair few partners—it’s where we make organization-wide decisions, so they’re supposed to be there—but we also had folks who work the production line at Mail Order, a busboy, a baker, and a newsletter maker. As Gareth Higgins says, “Each human being, each of us — that’s you and me, is a universe of indescribable value. No one is worth more or less than any other.” And that is indeed what we aspire to show at the huddle. Like all the first lines in this essay, everyone in attendance could learn to take the lead, and, I’m confident, do it well!
5. Bringing everyone’s voice into the room. Years ago, Stas’ Kazmierski taught us to get everyone’s voice heard at the beginning of a meeting. It helps people feel included and increases the odds that they’ll participate. With 90 or 100 people, as we had last week, the icebreaker needs to be simple and quick, but we always do it. Everyone says their name and which business they’re from, then answers a question the facilitator has chosen. I believe last week’s was “What’s your favorite holiday food?” My answer was Pfeffernusse.
6. A new manager’s intro. We have a long-standing ritual that new managers in the ZCoB come to the huddle and do a formal introduction to the organization. It’s a wonderful way to connect dots across the organization, opening the door for the new manager to meet dozens of others from different parts of the organization. Basically, it’s an interview (like the one George Plimpton did with Billy Collins, only in this case it’s about the poetry of working in the ZCoB, rather than what it’s like to write a poem). Call it a casual but very cool Q&A done by one of the partners. The manager last week, Mara Neering, is the new accountant at the Roadhouse. Mara actually worked in ZCoB ages ago, when she was a student at Community High School next door to the Deli. She later moved to other cities, studied accounting, worked for an array of other restaurant groups, and then returned to the ZCoB via the Roadhouse last spring. Her responses, and her reflections on how different (in a good way) working here is, literally brought me to tears (also in a good way).
7. Open-book management. The first half of the three-hour huddle is really a ZCoB-wide practice of open-book management. Each business reviews its numbers, talks a bit about what’s happened, and, if we do our work well, offers even more about what’s coming up. People ask questions or make suggestions, sometimes both. I learn a ton every time. Open book is a game-changer!
8. Collaboration. By bringing such a diverse group together to talk about in-the-moment business issues and share forecasts for the coming months, the odds of collaboration are significantly increased. As writer Rebecca Gray Howell notes, “‘Collaboration is relational,’ … it is the relationship of the collaborators that makes the end-result.” And that is, indeed, just what happens in the huddle.
9. Slow and steady! When it comes to huddles, slow and steady doesn’t lead to headlines, but it will win the race. In an interview in the new issue of The Paris Review, French writer Hélène Cixous, born into a Jewish family in Algeria in the spring of 1937, suggests that most people are not interested in small things with “infinite wealth and complexity.” Rather, Cixioux says, “What they want is to receive a message at top speed, in big letters.” There is really no speed or big letters in either this essay or the ZCoB huddle. The way we do our huddles definitely takes time. Doing it well absolutely requires attention. And the wealth and complexity are infinite indeed.
10. Consensus decision-making. I’ve written a great deal about this subject. I continue to believe that using consensus in the right places could help many more organizations. It is, without question, a good way to make an organization more effectively democratic. We have been using consensus at the Partner level here for over 30 years now. While all hundred or so folks in the room can participate, the final decisions are made by consensus of the 22-person Partners Group. It works!
11. Staff Partners and transition. This is a bit of a two-fer on the list. You can read much more about Staff Partners here and see how powerful our decision to have them (made by consensus of the Partners Group) has been. At this huddle, we marked a transition, thanking two Staff Partners whose two-year terms were ending and welcoming two new ones into the role. It gave us a chance to formally recognize Jenny Tubbs of Zingerman’s Press and Hazim Tugun from the Bakehouse, who were great additions to the Partners Group for the last two years. Their closing comments were insightful and heartwarming. We then welcomed Rob Davis of Mail Order and Jason Ujvari from our Creative Services team. They shared inspiring intros, and I look forward to working with them.
12. Ending with appreciations. For 30 years now, we end our huddles—and every meeting, for that matter—with what my friend Lex Alexander taught us to call “appreciations.” It’s a few minutes—or in the case of a big meeting like the huddle, about 15 minutes—for people to publicly appreciate anyone or anything they want. Not everyone does, but many do. It always ends the meeting on a magically upbeat note of gratitude and good energy!

The construct of the huddle could, I believe, be an answer to a question my friend Carne Ross asked in his Substack last weekend. Ross was a dedicated British Foreign Service diplomat who grew greatly disillusioned by his government’s deceptive behavior and dissemination of disinformation surrounding the invasion of Iraq. Unable to deal with the dishonesty and obvious lack of institutional integrity, Carne Ross had the courage to resign. It seems that in the years following, Carne came upon anarchism, really in much the same way I stumbled onto the subject of dignity when dealing with my despair after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Carne began to write, too. A regular flow of books and essays has ensued. Eight years ago last April, Carne and I first connected about our shared affinity for anarchism. Ideas, support, and insight have flowed fairly regularly ever since. In a question that could well have offered me another outstanding opening to this piece, Carne inquires:

Could it be a system which through its collective but mindful (very mindful) construction promotes the maximisation of human freedom, fosters relations with others that bring to abundant life what matters most, love, and fuels and celebrates the exploration and, one hopes, the fulfilment of our very selves, at last. Imagine that! Can we?

My quick answer to Carne’s question is “Yes!”

To be clear, I don’t hold up the huddle here as some panacea to be universally embraced, but rather as a reminder that everyone can create something for themselves. They can design governance that’s appropriate for their own ecosystem, rather than have some faraway group of executives consult with outside experts hired to do the design for them. We have long said that the huddle is where we run the business. At least for a couple of hours, it’s a pretty remarkable and very different framework for running an organization of any sort!

In a quiet but very powerful way, the huddle strikes me as an example of what my friends at Indigenous Resistance say, in yet another worthy opening line:

Those who have dub power, lift us all up.

The huddle did indeed have dub power, and it did indeed lift a lot of us up in a big and very wonderful way! It also led me back to a story the members of Indigenous Resistance have shared. It’s about a spiritual leader they met many years ago in a Vietnamese monastery, who shared this:

I believe we need new ways of looking at power.

Compared to a typical board of directors meeting for another $80 million company, the ZCoB huddle is absolutely a new way of looking at power.

So, what does all of this mean in the context of the greater ecosystem we all belong to? In my attempt to parse all of this and understand the positive implications of the work at hand, I’ve found myself deep in the music of a British musician named David Benjamin Blower. A poet, a singer-songwriter, an author, a philosopher, a cellist, a guitar player, and more, Blower is, I believe, a very special person.

I have five of Blower’s albums, but of late I keep returning to his 2019 release, the title of which seems ideally suited to this week’s subject: We Really Existed and We Really Did This. My mind has been especially engaged with the second song, whose title would’ve been a wonderful first line for this essay, as you can tell, did become its title: “Everything is Changed.” The lyrics are strangely timely and perhaps a bit prescient. This song could serve as a soundtrack for any of us trying to make sense of the moment. At the very least, it feels like the right reflection on what will emerge from this country’s current existential crisis. Its opening line might well be the most powerful of all that I’ve offered in this essay. Here are the lyrics:

Everything is changed
All didst run its course
The present fears nothing more
Than a Trojan Horse
Ye who stake your existence
On borders and walls
The emerging future’s among you!
It’s within us all!
Everything is changed
Be still and listen
….
Everything is strange
Who here moved the piece?
That began the rearrangement
Of all things from west to east
Behold the readjustment
Of all those who said they knew
And all of the listless players
That don’t know what to do

Everything does feel like it’s changing, and it certainly seems pretty strange. If we can shape that change into something positive, then organizations working in ways akin to the huddle could be the future! Looking back at her childhood, Hélène Cixous remarks how her family members “were free … I realized only later how exceptional this was … Everything was alive.” This is very much what that huddle represents to me. The energy was awesome. It caught me up, and I followed its lead by writing this piece. This situation also reminds me of what Hélène Cixous said in a piece of hers published in The Paris Review:

I could say that I write the text, but it’s much more the case that the text writes me. It asks, Are you coming? And I reply, Yes, I am following you.

In that sense, I suppose the huddle sort of “wrote me.” It asked if I was going to come along to learn new lessons. And, as you can see, I followed. I hope some of the practices I shared above might serve as openings for you to make positive, more democratic, and more effective ways to work in your own organization.

In an era like ours, in which American authoritarianism is clearly on the rise, I frequently return to theologian Richard Rohr’s suggestion that “the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” Note that Rohr does not say “the practice of the perfect.” The work of democracy, whether it’s in a monthly huddle or any other format, is to get going with dignity and deference, to come together imperfectly, and to have conversations that create connection, collaboration, insight, and inspiration and make meaningful things happen in the process. It can be done.

So with all that in mind, we face the future, a future in which it feels like everything has changed. In response to which, yes, we can go out on the streets to demonstrate for dignity and democracy and, at the same time, we can also demonstrate that democratic practices are possible in down-to-earth, real-life ways.

In the interview with Jessica Yellin I mentioned earlier, Timothy Snyder said:

You can’t just watch democracy. Democracy isn’t a thing. It’s a verb. Like are you doing democracy? If we all do a little bit of democracy, I really do think all this is going to turn out.

When I take a step back, I realize the ZCoB huddle is just what Snyder describes: democracy in action. And when I reflect on the power of those three hours and the countless hours of work that have gone into making them possible, I come back to the title of David Benjamin Blower’s album, which is yet another good opening line. One day, we will be able to look back on this challenging period of our history, and with the benefit of much more distance than we might have today, we will say:

We really existed. And we really did this!

Much love and appreciation to you all. Let’s get to work!

Do something great with dignity

P.S. Gareth Higgins and I will be co-teaching a two-day ZingTrain seminar on March 25 and 26, entitled Reframing Your Leadership Stories and Beliefs. Seats are limited to sign up soon—we only do this once a year!