Transformative possibilities in the everyday – habit, affect and the unconscious

I was recently in a training being inducted into a new leadership programme. The course facilitators placed a heavy emphasis on bringing about changed ‘behaviours’ in those who were to study on the programme. Implicit in this focus is the idea that we know in advance what leaderly activity looks like. Additionally, the use of the plural ‘behaviours’, carries a false precision. The idea, I suppose, is that these ‘behaviours’ are identifiable and measurable, contributing to ‘evidence’ that someone has learned the leadership skills that are required, and can bring about the expected  ‘transformation’.

This programme is not at all unusual in having designs on our habitual conduct. Our family groups, the organisations we work for, the societies we live in all shape our every day behaviour, our habitual ways of dealing with each other, and may have aspirations for shaping them further: to make us conform, to make us cohere with others, to behave respectfully, to help groups work, to encourage us to spend more and commit more. While our socialisation may take  place largely prereflectively and unconsciously, in advanced capitalist economies there are algorithms, marketing and advertising disciplines which deliberately seek to direct our everyday actions towards certain ends. We live in an economy of persuasion. To what extent do we notice and become mindful of the ways in which our habits are shaped and how try to shape others?

From a pragmatic perspective, concentrating on the actions of one individual, whether they are in a leadership position or not, leaves out a great deal. For example, the leader may propose, but how does everyone else respond? Until we take the gesture and the response together we cannot begin to understand what an action means. And what kind of feelings are evoked in the exchange? To what degree are the habitual patterns of relating affected by the leader’s ‘behaviours’ as opposed to the broader game of games which is taking place in the organisation and beyond? How does the unconscious manifest in group dynamics, particularly if the group is anxious and uncertain? To what degree do context, time and artefacts make a difference?

While organisations tend to have grand schemes of wholesale transformation, change is a complex and uncertain undertaking.  From a complexity perspective, whatever we take transformation to be it is just as likely to arise from the micro, the minor gesture, the adjustments of habit in the every day following a break down, which can escalate into population-wide change.

At next year’s conference we are delighted to have Carolyn Pedwell, Professor of Digital Media in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University,  as key note speaker to explore these themes with us. Amongst Carolyn’s publications is her book Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation (McGill-Queens UP, 2021), which explores the paradoxical quality of habits, which enact the possibility of continuity and change both at the same time.

The conference begins on Friday 6^th June 2025 and finishes at lunchtime on Sunday 8^th. The currency of the conference is conversation and exploration in large groups and small.

I will put up a payment site in the New Year. Look forward to seeing you there.