How do you prevent radical rigidity in your team?

On my profile page there is a paraphrase of feminist icon and writer Emma Goldman (1869) that is close to my heart. Goldman was dancing at a dance party. A young revolutionary took her aside and said with a very serious expression that “a true agitator should not behave like that”. It would harm the movement. 

Goldman was furious and put him in his place, saying that she would not turn into a nun for the good cause; if that was what the good cause required, she wanted no part of it. This moment inspired the famous feminist paraphrase often attributed to her: “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.

For Goldman, this was more than a witty remark. She saw around her how radical movements were suffocating themselves with rigid expectations and ideological purity, causing joy, freedom and change to give way to conformity and moral control.

More than a century later, I still feel the dynamic Goldman described all too often. In all kinds of action groups and movements, I see the same struggle taking place: are you radical enough? Or are you actually too radical, scaring off our more pragmatic allies? When setting up the new office of S&L Netherlands, too, the question arises of whom we would and would not want to work for, who is not radical enough or, conversely, too radical. Logical, if you are a mission-driven agency.

In Joyful Militancy, by Purple Thistle founders carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, this tension is explored in depth. To do so, they introduce the concept of ‘rigid radicalism’ (I prefer to render it as radical rigidity). This is a way of thinking in which politics is no longer something you do, but something you have within you. That rigidity leads to a culture in which activists constantly measure and judge one another on the basis of how ‘pure’ their politics are. Anyone who deviates from the pure norm is branded as complicit or half-hearted. This is paralyzing and creates an atmosphere of constant self-censorship and distrust.

According to bergman and Montgomery, social media intensify this dynamic even further. Because as people and organizations, we have to share the right political positions and use the right words there all day long, otherwise outrage follows. Emma Goldman already pointed out that movements should not become a mirror image of the system they are fighting, with their own dogmas and mechanisms of control. Goldman fiercely resisted the drive toward ideological purity. She said about this in “The Hypocrisy of Puritanism”:

How do we break through this tension within mission-driven teams, organizations, and movements? carla bergman and Nick Montgommery offer the concept of “joyful militancy” for this. They resist the idea that activism must be a heavy and serious burden. Instead, the book proposes a framework in which joy, creativity, and optimism play a central role. By placing these elements at the heart of a movement, the movement can become more inclusive and more appealing to a wider audience. In the long term, this form of joyful activism can also be better for the well-being of activists, because it encourages self-care and strengthens the sense of togetherness within a movement.

Within teams, however, this does require a conscious choice to support each other’s growth instead of punishing each other’s mistakes.

In the tech startups of Silicon Valley, people often repeated the mantra: “Fail fast, fail often.” By this they meant that innovation and progress come from daring to make mistakes and then quickly learning from them. And although I think we can conclude that Big Tech unfortunately turned out to be better at daring to make mistakes than at learning from those mistakes, it may still be helpful here. Because instead of punishing mistakes, radical movements and organizations can create a culture in which experimentation and learning are encouraged. A safe culture, without fear of punishment. Criticism, self-reflection, and being able to have a fundamental conversation about your ideas remain important, but within a team these should be used as tools for growth and not as weapons.

A concrete tip for organizations and teams: facilitate regular feedback moments in which mistakes and faux pas can be discussed openly without fear of social punishment, normalize making and admitting mistakes or uncertainty. As a leader, create space in your teams for pilots, small experiments, and iterative improvements. Embrace joy and celebrate successes; as a movement, we still forget this too often. 
 

And don’t be afraid to put on your dancing shoes: sometimes the only answer is to dance on the volcano.

*The anecdote from Emma Goldman’s autobiography is almost never shared in full, so I translated it and included it here in its entirety: 

“At the dances I was one of the most tireless and cheerful. One evening a cousin of [fellow revolutionary] Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a serious face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it was not proper for an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon. It was unbecoming of someone who was on her way to becoming a figurehead in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only harm the Good Cause. I was furious at the boy’s shameless interference. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Good Cause constantly thrown in my face. I did not believe that a Cause that stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for liberation and freedom from conventions and prejudices, would demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a monastery. If that was what it meant, I did not want it.”