Agile, Ways of Working, and NZ politics

25 January, 2023 in Newsletter

Could Agile support a safer environment for people in politics here in Aotearoa?

Whether or not politics is your thing, its looking like 2023 could be a difficult year.

Recent events highlight how being an active participant in NZ politics can be a dangerous thing, depending on who you are and the policies you promote. Last year’s local body election campaigns, at least here in Tāmaki Makaurau, also saw some candidates — especially Māori, Pacific, Asian, and other people of colour — face racist slurs, extremely aggressive behaviour at public meetings, and hoardings being defaced with swastikas.

Tina Ngata’s piece from this week describes some of the threats to Jacinda Ardern and explains that New Zealand isn’t ready for a Māori Prime Minister.

Efeso Collins ran a high energy and positive campaign in Auckland last year, while simultanously carrying a huge mental load to manage the negative responses to his standing for mayor as a Polynesian man with a progressive policy agenda.

By contrast, Chris Hipkins seems so far to be experiencing a pretty decent level of psychological safety as our new PM — going by this interview where he’s comfortable to say (repeatedly!) that he is someone “who makes mistakes”, call himself “relatively upfront and relatively inclusive” and that he’s “feeling energised and enthusiastic” about the job. His request for his family’s life to be kept private seems to have been heeded.

Agile and the efforts by its practitioners in the business world to develop and practice more collaborative ways of working, methodically building psychological safety for people in companies who are designing and developing tech, products and services — has in my opinion already done a lot to help some of us learn through experience a set of skills, mindsets and actions which are also valuable in political and community contexts.

(As an aside, sometimes when I’ve been in the middle of a team or Agile squad process where we’re perhaps trying out a new approach to considering an idea or making a decision, I’ve reflected on how this might also be a useful collective experience that could be transferable to the very different context of a Tangata Tiriti discussion towards the type of Constitutional Transformation described here.)

But, back to 2023 — perhaps we might be able to help make the upcoming election environment a little less toxic, by feeding in some of the collaboration, mediation & facilitation practices from worklife into the gnarly world of NZ political discourse?

Originally published on Medium.