Having Courageous Conversations

Our CEO Natalie Collins reflects on our commitment to courageous conversations.

by Natalie Collins

Founder and CEO

We had a joyous time at our recent weekend away (read more HERE). Alongside beautiful time spent together in a wild and wonderful venue, we had important discussions about what we’re building at Own My Life and what needs to be in place in order for us to grow in healthy and ethical ways. 

And we have identified that Learning will be a core part of how we work.

Prioritising learning

Learning-as-knowing

For some of us, learning can be understood to be linear process in which we go from not knowing something, to becoming knowledgeable about that thing.  This is certainly part of our Own My Life model; female practitioners attend a 5-day training with us and at the end of it they have gained the knowledge to be able to deliver 12-session Own My Life courses as part of their work.  And what a JOY that is to behold as women are enabled to own their lives!  Let us call this learning-as-knowing.

Learning-as-growing

Organisationally, learning as a cognitive process in which we now know something that wasn’t previously known features less prominently than learning as a growth process; in which something goes wrong or someone is failed and we learn from this and become better as a result.  Let us call this learning-as-growing.

And it is particularly learning-as-growing that we want to cultivate at Own My Life. 

Throwing a dead bird

In the early noughties, the Labour government was being encouraged by some to move away from their predecessor’s bureaucratic mode of Tory government.  Often referred to as a “Weberian” style (pronounced Vey-bare-ian after the German sociologist Max Weber) the Tories with their no-such-thing-as-community individualism had a “command and control” approach, which some felt was at odds with the more communitarian values of Labour.  One of those who felt strongly about this was Jake Chapman who in 2004, through the Think Tank Demos, in 2004, published a pamphlet entitled Systems Failures.  You can read it HERE.

He memorably gives the following analogy (based on ideas from Richard Dawkins and Paul Plsek) in arguing that we need to build complex adaptive systems: “One approach is to tie the bird’s wings, weight it with a rock and then throw it. This will make its trajectory (nearly) as predictable as that of the stone, but in the process the capability of the bird is completely destroyed.”

For Chapman, the crucial ingredients that contribute to systems failing are the following:

• Aversion to failure.

• Pressure for uniformity.

• Shared assumptions.

• Lack of past evaluation.

• Lack of time.

• Tradition of secrecy.

• Dominance of turf wars.

• Loss of professional integrity and autonomy 

  
  

And it just so turns out that addressing each of these is fundamental to building an organisation committed to learning-as-growing.  Thank you Jake Chapman!  (It is potentially an indicator of how much he felt that government or academia could resolve these systems failures in that he walked away from both to have a small holding with chickens near Exmoor).

Kerosene on a smouldering pile of papers

For those of us who have been responding to men’s violence towards women and children for any length of time, Jake Chapman’s system failure ingredients will be very familiar.  These have always been an issue for organisations wanting to improve women’s lives, but the era of competitive commissioning in which women’s sector organisations have basically become government contractors has poured kerosene over what was previously a slightly smouldering pile of papers in the corner of a room.

It’s not that organisation intentions are bad or that those involved don’t absolutely care about women; but that in 2026, the systems failure ingredients are baked right into the fabric of what is assumed to be the only way to do this work.

And yet, it is only as we meaningfully engage with these ingredients, teasing out how they have become a core part of our work, that we can question them, strategise ways to change and start to work differently.  And that is hard and risky work. 

Courageous Conversations

As part of our efforts to counter these ingredients of systems failure, at Own My Life we are keen to build space for “courageous conversations”.  It was in the 1990s and early noughties that Glen Singleton coined the term “courageous conversation” in the context of racial justice context, with Susan Scott also utilising the term in efforts to confront tough issues and build trust in workplace contexts.  It was Susan Scott’s work that informed our weekend away discussions.

We are keen to be an organisation that has courageous conversations.

Internally, this can be tricky.  As a virtual organisation, we gather in the same physical space only once a year, and so those informal opportunities that exists in physical offices, over coffee or in the corridor, simply do not emerge virtually to broach difficult subjects with colleagues.  This makes confronting issues tricky and without a formal framework for having such discussions, it is very hard to find a way through.  This is compounded within women’s organisations, as most of us have been socialised (thanks to patriarchy!) to be polite, kind and dismiss our own needs and feelings.  Within Kim Scott’s framework of Radical Candor, may women’s organisations find themselves in either ruinous empathy or manipulative insincerity, neither is conducive to productive outcomes and both are greatly at odds with any efforts to combat the ingredients of systems failure.  Passivity and passive aggression must be opposed strongly if we are to see change (we should have a policy on bullying, the question is should we also include a section on passive aggression within it?).  We’re still working through the practicalities of our internal commitments to courageous conversations, so watch this space for more on this!

We are also committed to external courageous conversations.  An example is THIS article about a 2025 conference I attended.  It is tempting to think that any form of criticism about an organisation will be harmful to their work or (crucially!) could be damaging to the women their work seeks to help.  We presume that to be encouraging of them means to avoid being critical or confrontational.

Isn’t it interesting that the very term “encourage” is mostly a word about courage?!

Being encouraging isn’t about blithely or effusively saying something is wonderful when it is not.  And avoiding saying anything critical does not necessarily serve the interests of either the organisation or those they seek to serve.  If we care about either, we should be willing to challenge things that are contrary to the values or principles of meaningful work.  We should be willing to take risks, expend energy or take time to say how things can be better, otherwise they will not get any better.

If we attend an event or experience an organisation in ways that is contrary to how we understand good practice, this is an opportunity to be a gift of learning-as-growth to them.  As we care enough to articulate our concerns to the organisation, we are inviting them to learn, grow and make a bigger difference to women.

Sometimes we can do that privately, in direct conversation. Sometimes, if what they have done is public and if we have publicly been connected to what they have done, that courageous conversation may need to be started publicly too.

I was at a conference recently when I said we should be glad when women complain about us.  I didn’t mean it in some blasé way.  It can be incredibly painful for someone to have had such a difficult time that they need to raise a complaint.  And being on the receiving end of a complaint can be equally as painful, especially if the content of that complaint seems unfair or unwarranted. However, when a woman complains, that’s because she knows she matters enough to be heard.  We fail women if we only want them to engage with us gratefully.  We should be validating each woman in becoming her biggest, bravest and most badass self, and whilst gratitude might be an element of that, it is certainly not the only aspect of her. 

And this is partly why, at times, our courageous conversations will be had publicly.  We want to show women how to bring their whole self to a conversation, and we want to validate women who could end up feeling gaslit by everyone saying something was wonderful that they have not experienced as wonderful at all.  We will always be ready to say when the emperor is naked, no matter how many people want to tell us that his new outfit is SO fancy (THIS article is an example of that).

This won’t always be easy, either for us or for others.  Just as internal courageous conversations may be difficult.  But we will embrace both as a gift; whether we are the ones giving or the ones receiving that gift.  Because women everywhere deserve support that is committed to not failing them, to building systems that do not fail, and that remain courageous, regardless of the cost.