For nearly twenty years I lived next to a factory. For most of that time, a rhythmic whisper of working machinery accompanied my daily life, punctuated by a piercing bell that signalled a change of shift every eight hours.
A couple of years ago the plant fell silent as production relocated to a nearby town. This made sense on many levels, for both the business and the village. Yet the quiet was eerie, especially at night – it took me months to acclimatise to the absence of sound. Meantime, nature began to reclaim the site – resilient bushes grew in nooks and crannies high in the brickwork, and flocks of pigeons, rooks and seagulls roosted in the beams and window arches.
Calling the jumble of edifices that made up the works ‘the factory’ disregards their provenance: they were built at various times, using different materials and methods. Depending on where you stood to look at the patchwork of production halls, plant rooms, warehouses and offices, you might have seen a uniform and rather ugly block, or a quirky collage of contrasting rooflines.
As I write, the buildings are being dismantled. The official term is demolished, but this word conjures a brutal destruction which doesn’t reflect the precise and delicate undertaking I’ve witnessed since October. Yes, there are periods of earthshaking violence – six-storey walls crumble and crash to the ground and palls of masonry dust swirl in the wind, covering the locality with a grey shroud.
Yet there are also quieter periods of housekeeping, where nothing much seems to change. The skyline retains a single profile for a few days while rubble, girders and other wreckage are sorted for recycling, or for building temporary roads and platforms to support the work of heavy-duty excavators and bulldozers.
The daily soundscape is a symphony of thunderous rumblings, toe-curling scrapes and screeches, and cacophonous clatters, booms and bangs. Occasionally, there’s a pause – the machines are still and hard-hatted men assess the state of play with thoughtful concentration.
Overall, there’s an air of quiet industry.
Clearly, there’s a plan. Buildings are razed in an orderly sequence. However, it’s definitely an adaptive process, adjusting to whatever is discovered as the fabric of each structure is stripped away. The piles of scrap are frequently reorganised around the site. The initial timeframe has expired, yet the work is incomplete, despite a benign winter. I imagine the plans being reworked daily, if not hourly.
The changes in my local environment provide a powerful analogy for the wider world, where established order is being overturned through war, exile or the ballot box. The visceral and visual nature of the demolition reveals the painstaking work needed to skilfully take apart an infrastructure and safely handle the wreckage. Sadly, as leaders, we tend to give (and get) recognition for creating things, rather than deftly dismantling what is no longer required.
In a time of questioning how we’re led and governed and by whom, and as we unravel at least one union, we might ask: how will we treat the fallout of disintegration? The shorthand of ‘the EU’ or ‘the UK’, like ‘the factory’, masks a complexity of constructions assembled piecemeal over many years of changing circumstances. Disbanding such arrangements will impact in ways we don’t yet grasp. Each business and sector will have things to unpick as well as new possibilities to realise.
I wonder how we might place greater emphasis on the quiet industry of the ground-clearing that establishes sound foundations for new ventures.
Contemplations
- What are you currently planning to change or create?
- What needs to be carefully dismantled to prepare the ground for your aspirations to take shape?
* This post is published in Weekly Leadership Contemplations, along with fifty one other pieces.
