Dear renegades, mavericks, and deviants,

A few weeks ago, I watched a video clip that I'm sure many of you saw. Loads of people commented on it. It's called STORM, by GENER8ION and Yung Lean, directed by Romain Gavras.

Around fifty boys in school uniforms. One shot. 16mm film. Three minutes of choreography so raw, physical and precise that the comment section quickly became a support group of moved, weeping humans. It's not clean. These aren’t the best dancers in the world. And this isn’t the ‘best’ dance. Bodies collide. It looks, at moments, like a beautiful mess.

But it's a synchronized mess. And that, I think, is the whole point.

If I'm honest with myself, I think this piece resonates with me because it makes me think of my time serving in the Parachute Regiment alongside some of the nation’s most incredible people, and it captures the chaotic spectrum of young masculinity. Often misunderstood, blamed, and impulsive. Often hurting, powerful, and scary. Yet fiercely protective, vulnerable, and burdened.

Fundamentally flawed, yet a critical part of the answer to so many of life's challenges. Overly protective, overly protected. Yet overly exposed, overly maligned. Thoughtful one minute, impulsive the next. Deeply caring, deeply dangerous. Soft and hard together. Each individual’s experience is different, but similar enough to bind them irrevocably. They’re a walking contradiction: soft and hard all at once, and carrying a weight you'd only understand if you walked in their shoes.

It's a deliberately provocative piece, and people read it in completely polarizing ways. Some see a critique of toxic masculinity, hierarchy, and the violence we institutionalize in young men. Others see it romanticizing rebellion, aggression, and even nihilism. Plenty of critics think it's doing both at the same time, on purpose. Which, perhaps oddly, is the first thing it taught me.

Fifty people watch the same three minutes and walk away holding opposite truths, each of them convinced and each of them with a valid point. The disagreement isn't a flaw in the work; it is the work.

Nobody in this piece is moving in exactly the same way. Not quite. They're moving together. And the togetherness is more powerful precisely because the exact sameness isn't there. If you made all fifty of them identical and drilled every twitch out of them until they were interchangeable, you'd lose the magic, and the thing that makes it work the way it does. You'd have uniformity, but you'd lose unity.

And we've traded unity for uniformity for far too long.

Unity is not uniformity

Let’s look at the distinction, because our teams and communities are paying the price for confusing the two.

Unity is togetherness despite difference.
Uniformity is sameness despite difference.

A team can be full of people with different temperaments, backgrounds, and ways of seeing the same problem, yet they can still be completely united in what they're trying to achieve. That's unity.

If you demand that all of them think, speak, and approach every problem in the same way, that's uniformity. Which is brittle, because the moment reality stops matching the script (as it so often does), nobody in the room has any different angles to offer.

Healthy groups need enough unity to move together and enough difference to make moving worth it. Too little unity? You're just noise. Too much uniformity? You're an echo chamber …getting louder but learning absolutely nothing.

The trouble is that uniformity feels like safety. It's comfortable, and asks nothing of you except that you fall in line. Unity is harder, because it means staying in the room with people who see things differently and not needing them to become you first.

The hard part (a view from the mess)

Much of society is hard right now. A veritable pressure cooker, in fact.

There's a cultural pull in almost every direction to pick a side, plant a flag, and treat everyone on ‘the other side’ of the line as a problem to be defeated rather than a person to be understood. We judge others by their behavior, but ourselves by our intentions. We decide who someone is from the worst thing they've said or done, and stop there. You only need to look at the tone and nature of the political debate and societal challenges in the UK right now to see this in action. Which is why these are big and important conversations that need to be had. Just not in this way.

I'm not going to pretend I float above this. I've misjudged people, I’ve dug my heels in on the wrong hills, and I've assumed things that weren't true. I've believed passionately in things I later discovered weren't quite as I'd believed them to be, and I’ve also chosen convenience over courage. I suspect you have too. I suspect every human being has. Most of us still do, some days more than others.

But I've done the opposite, too: I’ve been softer than I should’ve been when the moment called for a stand.

So this isn't a sermon from someone who's figured it out; it's a note from someone who is a mess, is knee-deep in the mess, acknowledging the mess, and trying to do a bit better.

Our leaders need to get better at having the difficult conversations. We all do. To be consistent and own up to mistakes. It's entirely possible to mean good and do wrong. Justice without love isn't justice, it's judgment. Love isn't soft – it's sometimes uncomfortable, but it's never administered to make ourselves feel better.

Abraham Lincoln is said to have put it like this: “Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.” I'd add only that you can stand firm and still do it with grace. Bertrand Russell saw – and articulated beautifully – the other side of it. Writing in 1933, as he watched the Nazis’ rise to power, he warned that the trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Both lines point to the same delicate balance between conviction and humility. Because harm lives wherever there is conviction without humility.

Closer than is comfortable

I heard something in a vicar’s sermon this weekend that I both love and think is really powerful.

She was once in a small room with Rowan Williams (the former Archbishop of Canterbury), and he dropped this gem:

“The secret to unity is getting close enough to the face of someone you disagree with to see the face of Christ in theirs.”

You don't have to be religious to feel the weight of that. Strip the theology if you need to (and can 😉), because the core truth still remains. What it's really describing is the discipline of getting close enough to someone you're sure is wrong, just to see their undeniable humanity. And actually being open to it teaching you something. That’s important.

It takes massive, unglamorous courage to do that. Real courage, not the performed kind. Which is harder, here’s why:

• It wounds our ego. It means overcoming ourselves, our certainty, and the intoxicating need to be right.
• It exposes us. At that proximity, you can actually get hurt.
• It looks like losing. Critics might call our empathy ‘weakness’ or ‘selling out’.

But it's not losing. Getting close enough to understand someone you disagree with is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do, and one of the easiest things to mistake for surrender. But it’s not surrender either. Instead, it’s the hardest chess move you'll ever make. And it takes courage because hardly anybody else is doing it, so it's lonely to be the one who does.

It's important and powerful precisely because it's hard, lonely and exposing. The most worthwhile things often are.

Drop the megaphone, embrace the pause

To be clear, this isn't about letting everything go. I'm not arguing that things aren’t inherently right or wrong, or that the answer to every disagreement is a shrug and a hug. Some lines are worth drawing, and some things are absolutely worth standing on.

But the harder truth is that very few things are 100% right or 100% wrong. True courage doesn’t just lie in holding your ground; it lies in holding your ground while staying humble and genuinely open to the possibility that the person across from you is carrying a piece of the truth that you can't see from where you're standing.

Breaking the cycle of hurt people

There are a lot of people hurting right now. And hurt people often hurt people. That's how the default loop of the world runs.

But what if we opted out?

Some people, carrying every reason and justification to pass the hurt along, choose not to. Instead, they choose to drop the hot potato. And they refuse to do to the next person what was done to them.

What if we were those people?

If we just shout at people, without ever being willing to hear why they believe what they believe, we achieve nothing. Not without force. And force hurts everyone it touches, including the person wielding it. There's almost always a less destructive way, if we're willing to do the harder work of finding it. And if we do choose the destructive path, it can never be done lightly.

Grace. Grace is the way. Grace is choosing to put aside, just for a moment, what someone is owed or what they deserve. Not forever, or as a permanent excuse. Just enough of a pause to break the cycle instead of feeding it.

Unity isn't everyone moving the same, it's everyone choosing to move together, and being brave enough to get close enough to see why people move the way they do.

So what?

I haven't figured out how to live this perfectly. Not even close.

But I keep coming back to one thing: it's possible to be both incredibly strong and deeply vulnerable. It's possible to be right, and to let that overwhelming sense of ‘right’ make us do things that are wrong. It's possible to be convinced of something today and hold a slightly different perspective tomorrow. And if it's possible for us, it's possible for those we disagree (or clash) with.

Watch a crowd move as one sometime. Notice they haven’t all become identical, they've just chosen the same direction, while all staying entirely themselves – an aligned mass of individuals. I think that's the thing worth building …in your team, in your community, in the rooms you walk into this week.

So, a quick audit for your week ahead:

• Where have you been choosing uniformity and calling it unity?
• Where have you been shouting when you could have been listening?
• Where could you get a little closer to a face you'd rather keep at a distance? (In a totally HR-compliant sense, of course).

It's harder than picking a side. It's braver, too.

Oz A

P.S. If you read this and disagree with me, good. Tell me why in the comments. I'll do my best to get close enough to see it your way, even if I don't end up agreeing. That's rather the point. 😉

Oz Alashe

CEO and Founder, CybSafe

What did you think of today's email?

Your feedback helps me create better emails for you!

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.