“We will restructure their function, and ours,” says Jesse Williams

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Having had a week or two of reflection on Jesse Williams acceptance speech for a BET humanitarian award, the line that strikes me as most powerful and actionable comes about halfway through, at the close of an argument about the systemic abuse of power.

We are going to have equal rights and justice in our own country, or we will restructure their function, and ours.

What caught my attention first is the organizational language. In the management world, those words signal a very specific series of events in which formal leaders make a decision to change the goals and strategy of an organization thus necessitating a restructure of operating frame and logic. The lingo differs from social movement language that might suggest we make changes of heart, or military defense rhetoric that emphasizes destroying an opponent and retaking control. Here the changing of rules and roles references the long history of constitutional law utilized by the civil rights movement paired with the language and logic of organizational development found in the public, private and third sectors.It’s progressive in nature and notably lacks reference to the destruction of others.

That signal is important. Change that happens through organizational structures like law, public administration, and private management has a very different dynamic than change that happens through popular culture and/or armed conflict. It’s yet another reason to infer that the movement Williams represents is an inherently just one that is philosophically committed to managed adaptation.

Williams’ words also signal an important question that will be familiar to most organizational leaders, change to what? Systemic change, by definition, requires participants to shift their views of reality through an examination of moral values, institutionalized logic, and behavioral patterns. It’s particularly tricky for formal leaders (who may have been responsible for designing the current structure and usually benefit from maintaining some measure of status quo) to see where the future lies of the changes required to get there.

The fish doesn’t perceive the water, it just knows how to swim.

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