Ronan Harrington (Alter Ego)

Recently, we spoke with Ronan Harrington, as part of our ecosystem mapping project to map the space that we work within.

Ronan’s work with Alter Ego

Alter Ego has gone through several phases of evolution. It began five years ago, as a gathering and a network to explore the connection between spirituality and politics. These are seen as frames to describe inner transformation, outer transformation, and collective transformation. The aim was to gather people who had influence in the progressive political and cultural change space.

Post-Brexit and -Trump, the political map was really rewritten. Alter Ego was grappling with how to move beyond postmodern identity politics, which is the center of gravity of progressive politics. They took inspiration from Metamodernism and are very connected with that school of thought. This became a renewed focus, trying to understand what it looks like to forge a politics that is post-tribal and post-ideological to the degree that it can be.

Then Richard Bartlett from Enspiral Foundation joined and has been leading Alter Ego alongside Ronan. The emphasis shifted process-wise, towards getting better at building Microsolidarity networks, which is a framework Richard created. So the gatherings became activations for a wider network, and they became interested in asking: How do those doing change work in the world support themselves in maintaining good mental and emotional health? In doing so, they created co-therapy spaces (crews) where individuals can really be operating from a source of wholeness and wisdom. This was all something of an experiment for them.

However, Richard and Ronan each separately have their own businesses. Ronan is a public speaker and runs a consultancy around reinventing organizations. So recently, they have both been actually focused on their own businesses and getting their own lives in order.

Ronan’s current focus

Personally, Ronan has grown a bit tired of gathering countercultural liberal progressive groups and preaching to the choir, more or less. With their latest round of funding, he is more interested in building a new network of more mainstream policy and business leaders. So a lot of his work now is in initiating new relationships and cultivating one-to-one connections with these people. After all, in organising a gathering called Alter Ego, he couldn’t really expect them to show up off the bat.

There are of course difficulties and questions which arise around this. For example, how do you create an effective revenue model in this field? In building the relationships with these mainstream institutions, businesses, and policy leaders, is there something that you can actually sell into the organization that sustains the actual network building and the influence through networks?

Ronan believes that our communities hold a lot of expertise and transformation within them, so what does such transformation look like as an offering to organizations? The aim is to ensure that it isn't just leaders who are taking a break from their organizational lives to have these experiences, but actually that these experiences are integrated into their organisation.

Burnout and Resilience

Ronan has been very influenced by RethinkX, a think tank he’s been working with for the past year, and their framework of technology disruption. He is particularly interested in how the mainstream interacts with the kind of inner world that we are very steeped in within the systems-change space currently. For Ronan, resilience is a useful framework for this interaction. For many in mainstream institutions and businesses, mental health and burn-out frequently arise as prominent issues. As such, the notion of resilience acts as an accessible framing for people to engage with this burnout and their inner world. So, he is now working with an organization called Tough Cookie, which does mental resilience training.

He might well return to the countercultural progressive space, but right now he doesn’t have so much appetite for it. There are many organizations doing that: he names Perspectiva and the Emerge network as particularly impressive actors in the space. So he would like to carve a slightly different niche.

A place of ease

Philosophically, Ronan is interested in what it means to operate from a place of ease when working, and what kind of quality of decision making and effectiveness comes from that. After all, many of us working within the space carry deep conditioning in linking productivity with self-worth, so he wants to move beyond this.

Speaking of network building and organising gatherings, Ronan is inspired by the Japanese word, nemawashi, which means the process of slowly preparing the ground for change. He sees the work he does as very solid, very subtle, behind-the-scenes work. The hope then is that people start slowly to learn from and to embody the kind of values that they address at an Alter Ego event, for example. The aim is ultimately to encourage a deepening of emotional spiritual depth and cognitive complexity. And so he is just encouraging this in a humble way.

For Ronan, that can be as simple as putting on to someone's radar a piece of thinking that they never would have otherwise encountered, like The Listening Society, for example. Or it can involve introducing people to a series of practices which can help them – he recalls introducing one burned-out client to yoga nidra as a useful way to get quiet and concentrated. So the methods and aims are humble, but profound. This is an attitude we appreciate here at Life Itself and seek to embody ourselves. Ronan feels that the major cultural movements of the 21st century are already in play. And he adheres to a form of Taoist philosophy in trying simply to encourage the good currents as best he can.