Secret Musings of a Change Agent 13 - Sheni Ravji-Smith
What makes ordinary people great at making change happen? What characteristics do they share? What path have they followed? What’s their attitude to failure? And what advice would they give to others? I’m continuing my mission to understand more to help us understand how we build change capacity in our organisations for the future. This week I’m talking to Sheni Ravji-Smith whose journey to Greater Manchester Health and Social Care OD supremo is grounded in her personal mission to make a difference to the wonderful place we call our world.
Sheni Ravji-Smith has a aura about her. It’s hard to pin down and describe but she’s one of those people who never fails to top up your energy levels. She speaks with care and compassion whilst at the same time continually challenging and asking the why questions that help us all to move our thinking forward. I’ve been wanting to feature Sheni since I started this blog series because for me she epitomises a modern day change agent. She connects and enables people, she’s not afraid to explore difficult subjects and challenges, she asks questions that get to the heart of what matters. She does all of this with an inspiring sense of positivity and optimism and in a way that ensures people feel safe to “go there” with her. So what can we learn from Sheni that will help us to think differently about how we build change capacity within our organisations?
In common with many of the people who have featured in this series, Sheni has not had a purposeful or linear career pathway. Brought up in Peterborough, a place Sheni describes as “an interesting place to be brought up as a brown girl”, she recalls a meeting with a careers advisor. She shared her interest in working in the arts. The advice she got? 1. Get married and have kids 2. Be a nurse because you’ll get loads of time off when you get married and have kids 3. Get a job in a factory. Nothing wrong with any of the options per se but completely missing her aspirations and loaded with preconceptions and stereotypes. Sheni’s mum was disappointed that she wanted to work in the arts however when she heard about the advice given to Sheni, she marched her back to school and demanded the careers advisor give her some proper advice. Sheni’s mum and dad had been creative teenagers themselves before they moved to the UK. Once here they had no opportunity to pursue their chosen careers and determined their children would, made sure Sheni grew up surrounded by stimulus and books.
Sheni did get to art college and she describes her move to London as a clear decision that she was leaving Peterborough and not going back. She sees this time as the beginning of a conscious journey towards change. A realisation that she wanted to make a difference - she just didn’t know what or how yet.
Art college brought Sheni into contact with some very different people to the people she’d grown up around. This opened her mind to challenging perceptions and she learned “there’s always another way to look at something”. Sheni sees this experience as a pivotal part of her evolution. She saw the privilege that her peers had experienced and felt the contrast to the working class background that she had grown up in. University gave Sheni the opportunity to test out who she was and try out different versions of herself which she sees as a hugely important part of the journey to authenticity, the warts and all stepping into the space as who you truly are. “This experience lit the fire beneath my feet”, says Sheni, “I realised that it wasn’t enough that some had and some did not. University is a privilege so it has to be meaningful and about more than the exchange of knowledge.”
From University, Sheni went to work in children’s television. This is where she started to hone her thinking with the realisation that “change isn’t about me, it's about enabling change in other people ''. She noticed that the photos displayed as a backdrop to children’s TV programmes all contained children who looked broadly the same - white, middle class kids with a feel good story. Sheni seized an opportunity when the TV channel ran a huge national competition offering a prize of getting to play a live music set in London. She leaned in and decided to actively champion children who didn’t have support around them. As a result a 14 year old working class young man who had developed an amazing talent as a drummer from listening to his brothers records was invited down to London to play a live set. Her colleagues were cynical and she heard chatter about how his working class family would all be showing up for the free food and drink. “I don’t know what happened to him after that”, says Sheni, “but that experience showed him possibility.” Sheni became disillusioned with the world of TV and the attitudes of people around her and moved to Manchester to do a Postgraduate degree, not least to give her some space to work out what was next.
“I realised that it wasn’t enough that some had and some did not. University is a privilege so it has to be meaningful and about more than the exchange of knowledge.”
She loved Manchester so much, she stayed. After uni she started her own Arts company running a festival in the infamous Green Room that used to be on Whitworth Street in Manchester. She toured it and took it to Europe. The festival focused on showcasing artists who had not previously had opportunities to show their art forms because of preconceptions about what they should have been producing. Sheni loved doing this - it brought her two passions together, the arts and social justice - but it didn’t pay the bills.
Sheni took a job working for the Greater Manchester arm of Youth Music as a way of earning money and this is where she started to learn about how structural organisations work. She was involved in supporting artists who were struggling to make a living to gain employment delivering creative education in schools. This, Sheni describes as “the beginning of my squiggly linear journey to becoming a change agent”. It’s also where Sheni became aware of her superpower - connecting people up, nurturing and curating them to create something new. “It’s the best feeling in the world”, says Sheni. A superpower that she took with her as she moved on to work across the cultural landscape, whilst at the same time having a parallel career in public service and more recently, for Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership, where she uses it to help transform the health and social care system.
Connect Curate Create
Sheni epitomised the mantra “we rise by lifting others”
Asked about what failures she has learned from, Sheni talks of how she tends to reflect and learn with the passage of time. She describes as the “matrix moment” the feeling that time slows down around you and you’re able to make sense of things. Sheni talks of how she’s always felt like an outlier and like she’s had a foot in a number of camps rather than submerging herself into any one tribe. She describes never quite feeling at the heart of anything and a growing awareness that she was waiting for permission. It took her around 10 years to realise she didn’t need anyones permission. “I am enough. Sometimes we will align, sometimes we won’t - and that’s OK”. That’s a powerful mantra that she now carries with her - and maybe that gets to the heart of her aura.
I ask Sheni about who has influenced her along the way. She names three powerful women. First up is her mum. She had a big influence on Sheni - the marching her back to get proper careers advice exemplifying the spirited role model she is. Next up is Gerri Moriarty, a community artist who is passionate about cultural democracy believing everyone has a right to express their self creativity. She inspired Sheni with the power of her understated approach, the way she curates and navigates people. Last but not by any means least, Sheni talks with real warmth about Nina Purcell. Nina mentored Sheni and helped her to recognise that how she approaches organisational change, how she curates people and how she uses questions to challenge and shift thinking has a name. Sheni came to see that all the stuff she does instinctively is actually really damn good Organisational Development. And with that realisation she found her professional home and even more importantly, she found her tribe.
We end our conversation with two pieces of advice to aspiring change agents from Sheni. Her first piece of advice is to get to know the ecology of your business by asking questions and listening - don’t just talk to one part of an organisation but spread your focus. It takes time but it gives you the data you need to work out what your next steps are and from this, the organisation will reap benefits. Secondly, find your tribe and trust your instincts when you make decisions. Once you find your tribe, says Sheni, they will always be honest and they will come to be your work family.
Talking to Sheni was an inspiring joy as always. For me, she brought to mind the saying “We rise by lifting others”. In a world that feels increasingly divided, for organisations to thrive we need more people like Sheni who excel in bringing people together and enabling them to find their most powerful and impactful self. If you’ve enjoyed reading this blog, check out my Secret Musings of a Change Agent series.
