2.1 Epic stories
These stories focus on heroic or noble deeds by people who are celebrated within organisations. They tend to celebrate qualities such as courage, wit, integrity and honour. These are qualities perhaps most associated with leadership.
Racial equality is rich in epic stories, with seemingly powerless individuals standing tall against cruel ideas and practices, and gaining some measure of justice in the end. These stories tend to deal with big systemic injustices suffered at the hands of governments and institutions, but in a way that personalises such experiences. That is to say, they draw attention to how a specific person experienced injustice and how they successfully fought back.
A twist on the epic story is the epic-comic story. These are underdog tales, which celebrate an unlikely hero managing to outsmart bigger forces. They are epic because you have the spectacle of a normal person achieving something extraordinary. They are comedic because the underdog manages to make the big forces they are fighting against appear petty and ridiculous.
Nowadays, people might be more sceptical of heroes or epic deeds in general – this detached attitude is exacerbated by the profusion of information and competing demands on attention we are all subjected to. In some ways, adopting a more detached view of ‘hero’-leaders is a welcome development, demonstrating that we are becoming more critical and discerning, less easily influenced and less likely to be manipulated by seductive people. However, it would be a shame if people stopped believing that radical change was possible. Sometimes we need to believe in the impossible in order to make big, systemic change happen.
Activity 2 Finding epic stories
Find your own example of an epic story. This story should speak to something valuable that you could follow in your work, and it should be a story that you could share with others to inspire them. If you like, you could actually share the story with a colleague, and then ask that colleague if they can think of an epic story that they could share with you.
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One example of an epic story is that of the trade union leader Christian Smalls, who successfully took on Amazon in the US by unionising a warehouse in Staten Island, New York. Fired from the company after he organised a protest walk-out over health and safety issues during the COVID-19 pandemic, Smalls did something unexpected. Instead of walking away, he teamed up with his friend, Derrick Palmer, and between them – two Black men in their early 30s – they established a new, independent trade union, the Amazon Labor Union (ALU). With little in the way of resources or organising experience, the pair taught themselves organising, establishing themselves among the workers and leading a successful campaign for union recognition, despite fierce and well-funded opposition from the company (Kantor and Weise, 2022).
Interestingly, however, the story does not conform to the traditional and individualistic heroism of epic stories. Smalls, Palmer and colleagues spent a lot of time and energy listening to the stories and experiences of Amazon workers. They set up a camp next to a public bus stop near the warehouse, which they used as a hub for being responsive to the needs of the workers (Greenhouse, 2021; Kantor and Weise, 2022). This is not an overly romanticised story where a single person dazzles a crowd with a moving speech and the work is over – rather, it involves much hard graft, listening and adaptation. The story of this unionisation is now routinely used in other union drives as an inspirational example of how workers can and do exercise power.