Public Announcement about Petition
Public Announcement by Marvin Schulz & Leo Widrich (posted 7/7/23)
Hey everyone!
Leo and I want to inform you about some of the recent events at the Radical Honesty Institute.
The first half of 2023 has been quite a turbulent, heavy, and very insightful period. It brought to light many overlooked issues and dysfunctionalities we had accumulated on an organizational level. It also surfaced a need to critically reflect on and update some of our workshop practices.
Here is a short timeline of the events.
Just when we hired Leo Widrich as the new Executive Director to help us create meaningful changes and a functioning executive team, Mak, one of my fellow company owners, resigned from his position on the board and shared a detailed petition with us, the owners.
You can read the full petition here.
The authors of the petition are requesting organizational changes and also workshop practice changes across a number of areas, a lot of which we also want and find valuable and relevant updates to the Radical Honesty practice (which some trainers have already implemented).
Many of these requests coincide with our own recent internal reflections. Some are new and point to blindspots we had in our “organizational blindness”.
We would like to share with you all, both about the changes we’ve been working towards as an organization and also acknowledge the petition and the asks the authors have for us.
The Big Transition (by Marvin)
For more than 30 years, Radical Honesty was in the hands of its founder and author of the book, Dr. Brad Blanton. Just around two years ago, a group of ten committed certified trainers bought “the company” from Brad (meaning the RH copyright, email list, website, and book rights).
We did this to preserve and further develop Radical Honesty after Brad’s retirement, and to also enable the future training of people who want to do this work. We became a peer-owned, second-generation personal growth training institute.
And we’ve grown a lot over the past couple years.
This growth has actually been a key factor in pinpointing some issues we had been sitting on and showing us the potential shadow aspects of our organization and the practice. Without this growth and a big-enough community that dared to speak up via the petition, we might have never stopped to actually look at the stuff that is not working and the people who have less than good experiences. And frankly, we did screw up by not looking at this sooner.
I want to hand the next sections over to Leo who elaborated more on the problem.
The Problem (by Leo)
Developed throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, Radical Honesty carries with it as a practice a set of beliefs and exercises, most of which have not been revisited or scrutinized since then on an organizational level. Most trainers have identified several issues named in the petition and already made changes on their own. This however created several layers of incongruity over the individual workshop experiences people would have.
The opportunity I, Leo, see is that we standardize certain processes so that the experience people have when attending a RH workshop are more consistent with the following elements.
Here’s a bullet list of areas of change I’m pulling from the petition that have been brought forward or requested to put more focus on from us as an organization:
Power dynamics between participants and trainers, as well as trainees and trainers as well as the board and the rest of the organization.
Racism as a dynamic, focusing on the fact that the current organization is mostly white.
Sexism as a dynamic in the organization, with a particular focus on the history of norms throughout the life of Radical Honesty workshops.
Informed consent concerning workshop agreements and more focus on trauma sensitivity when it comes to Radical Honesty interventions.
These are some important themes and areas for change and I recognize that as an organization we could have done more to bring standardized updates to our workshops regarding these topics, especially since so many of our trainers are trained in different modalities.
The Impact (by Leo)
As more and more of the above problems have come to light over the last 2 years or so and in a more snowballing manner in the last 6 weeks, we’ve learned more clearly what the impact of the lack of updated structures has had on trainer candidates and workshop participants.
We’ve heard from a number of people about boundaries being crossed in various ways that have been painful for them, reactivated old trauma they were trying to get over, and also incurring new wounds from opening up and being met in ways that haven't been validating or connecting.
We want to express our gratitude to everyone who had the courage to speak up about the issues they’ve observed and also our sincere regrets to everyone who has felt pain from experiences they’ve had with Radical Honesty. We feel clear headed now to rally around these issues and build connection with you and the wider community practicing and having received value from Radical Honesty in their lives, like so many of us have.
I also want to acknowledge here that several people in the organization have taken steps to no longer be associated with the organization because of the surfacing of these issues and they have resigned.
I imagine it was a difficult choice for them to make, and we are grateful to them for spending the amount of time they did with us and for offering feedback and suggestions on improvements they wanted to see.
What we are doing in the Future (by Marvin)
Here are some of the first immediate actions that have been taken as the results of our internal deliberations and some of the constructive, helpful feedback we have received from members of the community and workshop participants who shared their experience with us.
1. Leadership structure
When the team of trainers first started the Radical Honesty Institute (after buying “Radical Honesty” from the founder, Dr. Brad Blanton) we kept what used to be an advisory board as the new executive team, and that team suddenly became responsible for the organization.
Termed “The Board”, this group became a somewhat faceless, obscure entity in the background.
Our processes were slow and inefficient, often lacking awareness, transparency, and personal responsibility. One of the challenges was not knowing how to separate the practice of doing Radical Honesty from the actual running of the Institute. We are sorry for the pain this has caused to people and how we were not organized and professional enough to meet the demands of our growing community and popularity. We failed here, big time.
We are in the process of overhauling the entire leadership structure to serve our community and workshop participants better. We will inform you about the changes as they happen. The approach we are taking is that of becoming a sociocratic organization, some of which we’ve already outlined here. We imagine that this will address issues of transparency, power dynamics and other important topics we’ve been dealing with over the last months.
2. Pausing our training programs
We have decided to pause our trainer programs until further notice (Year 1 Course and in-person Trainer’s Training for sure, Year 2 Course is in question). We will first redefine our vision for Radical Honesty and then diligently redesign these trainings to reflect our updated view and include some of the training and modalities some of us have trained ourselves in over the last decade.
For those who are currently Trainer Candidates, we will develop ways to support your continued growth and development as we reflect on the overall process of training. This will very likely be less structured and far more individual. We recognize that the ways in which we did our training have led towards a huge amount of hurt for quite a few people. This is not what we want.
3. Diligent Reflecting on parts of the practice
The “personal clearing” part of Radical Honesty heavily focuses on getting over emotional load, taking personal responsibility, and, ideally, reaching forgiveness. While these are very useful and important skills to have access to, just doing this practice carries a deep possible shadow:
It enables people (and abusers) to not actually focus on the logical issues someone else is addressing, but putting the “need to get over their stuff” and “clearing their anger” onto them. In the worst cases, this can result in victim blaming and empowering harm by people in power who weaponize this practice by putting the need to get over emotions on the other person. In less severe cases this leads to gaslighting and feelings of not being heard.
Sadly, most of us have done this. And we owners have done this with members of the community – not actually hearing them but expecting them to just clear their own side of things – has led to the current frustrations, hurt, and as far as some cult accusations, which I understand.
Our job will be to keep the emotional personal processing tool but adding ways to address systematic power imbalances and introduce new elements to not only focus on “experiencing and getting over emotions” but also changing behavior. I look forward to this.
4. Reworking the workshop agreements
We have kept the same workshop participant agreements Brad Blanton used for decades. While I see value in having clear agreements to create a coherent learning field and a strong container for the group, the risk is that these agreements can become elements of control by trainers.
There will be two processes happening around this, at least. First, we will reflect and likely reword and maybe add / subtract our agreements. Second, trainers will likely be more free to choose how they want to create their containers according to their own view.
Originally, we followed Brad’s advice to not send the workshop agreements out to participants beforehand and only have a discussion around them in the beginning. While some of us felt this is quite controlling and somehow unethical, we did not make changes to this practice until now.
5. Feedback process
We have created and are in the process of fully implementing participant feedback forms (including an anonymous reporting form that already exists and can be found here) to learn more about the experience people have in our containers and improve the way we teach.
We already have both a support circle and a disciplinary committee in place to address feedback and complaints that have come up. We have also made plans here to turn these structures into what we’ve titled “The Care Team” to both review feedback from participants, offer feedback and coaching to trainers and the ability to escalate breaking of trainer / trainer candidate conduct agreements into trial phases or suspensions.
6. Community process
We are having a series of all-hands meetings as a way for us to come together as a community, discuss and come up with ideas for change and listen to each other. We’ve already had our first community-wide meeting and are going to schedule further ones where our intention is to invite everyone from the Radical Honesty community of trainees, students and participants to join as we’re in the middle of this change process.
7. Finishing our new vision/mission/values process
For us as an organization to move into the future with purpose and determination, I believe that having a coherent values/vision/mission statement to guide us is key. Since we’ve been somewhat lacking that and are in the middle of creating one, I believe that this will provide further clarity and direction for everyone involved with Radical Honesty. Again, we plan on publishing all of this transparently in the coming weeks once it is ready.
8. Continuous Education
Most of our founding members have trained themselves extensively and widely in either therapeutic, personal growth, or body-work modalities over the last decade to become better workshop leaders. As a group, we have had training in the Wheel of Consent, Transformational Chairwork, and How to be less Harmful as White facilitators. We recognize the need for further training, especially if we want to keep training new trainers and be more diverse.
9. Diversity & Inclusion
We are a group of all-white people running the Institute. We are painfully aware of our homogeneity and struggles to include more diverse voices in our company and workshops. This process starts with educating ourselves and doing our own work as the Institute leaders to unlearn and make conscious how we continue to maintain structures of marginalization. We admit that we have been unaware of our own blind spots and have not sufficiently prioritized this in the past. While we have created a BIPOC scholarship fund, and there is a proposal for the creation of a BIPOC circle, we sincerely recognize that a meaningful shift requires us to unearth the ways the organization maintains the status quo and to take sustained action to disrupt it.
Final words & Caveats (by Leo & Marvin)
These are our first initial steps taken. More updates will follow.
However challenging these recent happenings are, we take them as healthy signs of a living, growing organism and as a chance to improve and modernize Radical Honesty to reduce chances of harm and be of greater service to more people. We strongly believe that the change we’re undergoing is pointing us all to a stronger and more resilient organization for the future.
If you’ve read this far, we appreciate you for putting in the time and effort to understand what I judge to be a nuanced and layered situation. We’re doing our best to continue to work for a more connected world and what better opportunity to test our own ability to do so than to start in our very own backyard.
I, Marvin, want to say on behalf of the owners that we do care deeply for the people who chose to step into our workshops and we do this work with love and great care. And we have our blind spots, deficiencies, and personal issues coming up. Therefore I want to offer a sincere apology here in case you have had a bad experience at a Radical Honesty workshop.
We’d love to hear from you if any of this has brought something up in you that you’d like to share and you can email us anytime at support@radicalhonesty.com.
With love and gratitude and thanks for being there,
Marvin Schulz, owner & trainer and Leo Widrich, CEO also on behalf of the owners of the Radical Honesty Institute, Maggie, Anne, Selina, Tuulia, Pete, Christoph, Gudrun and John
Leo Widrich is the former CEO of the Radical Honesty Institute and a Coach. He also co-founded Buffer, a successful Social Media Marketing software. After stepping away from life as an entrepreneur for several years, he explored many traditions and modalities, including living in a Thich Nhat Hanh monastery in upstate New York, learning and practicing Radical Honesty and training as a Somatic Experiencing practitioner. As an Executive Coach Leo has worked with hundreds of leaders worldwide over the last 5 years.
Marvin Schulz started his Radical Honesty journey a decade ago and learned directly from Dr. Brad Blanton. He is now a Certified Trainer, co-founder of the Radical Honesty Institute, and helps train the next generation of trainers.