At least of two things: being dead, and walking. What about you?

When I hear people fret that they “don’t have lived experience,” I sometimes want to laugh. Even the Walking Dead has lived experience, of being dead and of walking. The question isn’t whether you have lived experience. You do. We all do. The real question is: lived experience of what?

The term “lived experience leadership” has been marinating in me for years now. The more it became a buzzword, the more uneasy I felt. Another box to tick in the already long list of tokenistic actions. Another shiny label to divide people rather than unite them. An identity marker, or rather, an identity reduction, a badge to wear or not wear.

The irony is, as I often remind people in rooms I facilitate, every single one of us has lived experience. To be alive is to have lived experience. You’re breathing? Congratulations, you qualify! The real question is: you have lived experience of what? And what happens when we hold these experiences together instead of pulling them apart?

In the voluntary and social sector, I see the use of “lived experience leadership” reinforcing hegemonic power structures, the same old power-over/power-under dynamics, just dressed in new language. It creates a power struggle that may shuffle who sits in the “leadership” chair, but leaves the chair itself intact. That’s not transformation. That’s rearrangement.

This is why I often talk about crafting power-aware spaces. To interrupt those dynamics. To create places where we don’t just trade positions in the hierarchy, but actually question the hierarchy itself.

And sometimes, I challenge people directly.

I’ll ask a room: “Who here has lived experience?”
People hesitate. Some hands shoot up proudly. Others hover mid-air. Many just look around nervously.

So I push further: “Who here is alive? Who here is living?” Nervous laughter. I let it sit. Then I say: “Exactly. All of us. Which means all of us have lived experience as long as we’re living.”

Again, the real question is not if we have lived experience, but: lived experience of what?

I sometimes ask: “Who here has lived experience of oppression?” Silence. Uncertainty.
“Who here has lived experience of power?” Again, hesitation. Sometimes embarrassment.

The truth is: all of us do. Both of them. We all sit somewhere along that spectrum. Different positions, different measures, different flavours. But we all carry experiences of both oppression and power. And that’s the point.

The deeper question becomes: how do I lend my lived experience to complement yours? How do we weave them together so that our collective understanding grows richer? Because none of us hold the whole truth on our own.

This is where intersectionality matters, not as a buzzword, but as a way of seeing. Audre Lorde reminded us: “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Our lived experiences are multidimensional. To pretend otherwise is to silo us into categories and strip away our humanity.

bell hooks wrote that “the practice of love is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” What if lived experience leadership was about that? Not about tokenising one person’s story, but about extending ourselves toward each other, nurturing growth through the weaving of many truths.

Because let’s be honest: in capitalist, neo-colonial structures, all of us — even those of us with more privilege — are commodified. We’re turned into units of productivity, of output, of funding bids. Lived experience becomes another commodity on that list. But our task as leaders is to refuse commodification and insist on humanity.

And in today’s climate, I fear that “lived experience leadership” is becoming obsolete … even harmful. It risks becoming just another tool to uphold oppressive power structures: decorating the house of oppression, rearranging the furniture, rather than reimagining the house altogether. For me, lived experience leadership is not a badge but a practice: leading from a place of knowing where you sit on the power–oppression spectrum, recognising that your position will always be shifting and changing. From that awareness, the question becomes: how do you relate to others? When do you amplify, when do you dim, and why? Because if leadership is to mean anything, it must be about moving together toward collective liberation — where none of us will ever be copy-pastes of each other, but all of us will be free nonetheless.

So what does this mean in practice? A few provocations and invitations:

• Shift the question. Instead of “Do I have lived experience?” ask, “Which experiences do I bring, and how do they intersect with others in the room?” This reframes leadership as a collective act of weaving stories, not competing for legitimacy.
  
  
• Notice the continuum. Practice naming moments in your own life where you held power and moments where you were oppressed. Share them. Invite others to do the same. The exercise itself destabilises the binary.
  
  
• Move from extraction to reciprocity. If you are drawing on someone’s lived experience, ask yourself: how is their contribution being valued, compensated, and protected? How is it changing the system, not just the optics?
  
  
• Centre intersectional joy. Do not reduce people’s leadership to trauma narratives. Ask about joy, creativity, and survival strategies. Our lives are never 100% pain or 100% joy, they are always a mixture of both, in every single moment. Create spaces where pain and joy can breathe together, and even dance with each other.
  
  
• Co-create power-aware cultures. Instead of waiting for one charismatic leader, build cultures where power is constantly examined, redistributed, and shared. This requires humility, listening, and practice, not a one-off workshop.
  
  

Ultimately, the work is not to decide who is “qualified” by their lived experience, but to reimagine leadership itself as a collective practice of liberation. When we recognise that all of us live within overlapping webs of power and oppression, we can stop competing for recognition and start building solidarity.

 

As Paulo Freire reminds us, “No one liberates themselves alone. People liberate themselves in communion.” And Grace Lee Boggs echoed this when she said, “It’s never a question of critical mass — it’s always about critical connections.”

 

If lived experience leadership is to mean anything, it must be about those connections, about that communion. About seeing ourselves not as siloed islands, but as parts of a living continuum.

I return to the laughter in the room when I ask: “Who here is alive?” That nervous chuckle is a doorway. A reminder. Leadership rooted in lived experience is not a competition of wounds. It is the practice of being human together … alive, living, messy, contradictory, and connected.

So, what about you? What lived experiences do you carry, and how might they weave with mine — with ours — to create something beyond checkboxes and buzzwords?