What to do with existential questions?
This article was originally published on the Thirty Percy Public notion pages, part of opening up the black box of funding.
One of my favourite things in life is to have the space to ask and explore big philosophical questions. This doesn’t stop at work — if anything, it amplifies.
What is an existential question? The big ethical and philosophical question that acts as the backdrop to all things, that so often we set to one side.
I’m sure many of us have been in work meetings where these big questions can paralyse action and movement. You’re then stuck in a loop of meetings to get out of and be ok with the inevitable imperfection/action that will never respond to the scale of the bigger questions that can loom large.
At Thirty Percy we’ve now experimented with two rapid funding ‘sprints’ in the last year. Each time taking six weeks to develop and design a funding program, iterate our internal processes and get money out of the door. Getting stuck in these big questions wasn’t an option; it’d delay our need to keep moving. Yet the big questions kept coming.
Instead of ignoring them, we developed a practical process / small facilitation hack (thanks, Camilla!). This looked like literally capturing these big questions on yellow cards — and banking them. And this simple act has been a revelation for me personally.
It gave visibility to what goes on in my head all of the time. To be witnessed in the writing, has made me feel validated and my contribution is more valued. And it has invited in different conversations for us as a team too.
Interestingly, I don’t need for there to be answers to these questions (but bonus if there is, and over time — we’re gathering insights to some). But getting them out of my head has helped.
It has also helped to recognise that part of the requirement of leadership is to be aware of the big picture, acting towards and in response to that and balance this relative to keeping momentum and small actions.
Perhaps no surprise there are so many existential questions in the world of philanthropy — when the very existence and basis of philanthropy is questionable and so often founded on extractive and degenerative means.
As I’ve been chatting about this micro practise- i’m realising how pervasive it is for people in philanthropy to just bury these questions. They can then become much bigger and it’s scarier to know what to do with them. But it wouldn’t take much to start to make them visible. Doing that is the first step to being able to work into and be curious about them. We’re now planning to weave in the really big existential questions into the decolonising work we’re just about to start too.
But this practice of capturing and taking visible existential questions could be applied to all sorts of sectors and places. And not just work — but life too.
I was talking to a Sarena, a collaborator at the School of Systems Change who said she captures these big questions at the back of her notebooks….then struggles to know where to put them when the notebook is done.
Which got me thinking/ down a whole other track of existential questions:
- What is there was a bank of existential questions — alongside conversation spaces to explore these in community?
- What if our strategies were just sets of big questions we use to navigate with?
- What if there were ways to share and converse across radically different responses to these questions
- What if the practice of capturing existentials questions was commonplace — and acts as a release valve for some of the pressure and dissonance we experience?
If you’re left wanting more — we’ve picked 30 of our favourite existential questions and shared them here — you can even share your thoughts and responses to some of these questions via our Existential Exchanges generator (on the left hand side of this page).
