Sylvia's Journal

My workday today consisted of 5 hours in traffic and two meetings of two hours each. I once wrote a poem about being in a traffic jam (It is seven on the highway/I am inching on new asphalt/While an energy crisis is cooking/In the not too distant future/And something big and powerful/Wells up inside of me/Just when the radio announcer/Talks about spirituality/“what’s that precisely?”/I think and, “what’s it got to do with/New roads and power grids?”/And I am sad/Because I want to do well/But I am stuck in a traffic jam.)

Two of my favorite quotes came to mind as I was digesting today’s meetings, the first one in particular:

‘By not understanding human behavior organizations unwittingly go to great lengths to create their own crises’ (James Scarnati), and
‘All problems I have with my fellow men stem from two things: I don’t say what I mean and I don’t mean what I say.’ (Martin Buber).

I watched in consternation as various parties to a complex hospital challenge kept harping at what the other had not done to make the hospital work. There was little evidence of systems thinking in the room and much defensiveness. All the talk was problem driven.

I made a few feeble interventions suggesting a shift in perspective and tackling the challenge by starting with a shared vision, but no one (in a position of authority) picked it up.

I know that it is hard for people who have never experienced what it is like to create a shared vision, to be swayed by words describing it. For many the word ‘vision’ is too fluffy (and maybe not manly enough?). Instead everyone went for the creation of a committee, developing terms of reference, coming up with recommendations. In the self-imposed urgency, which is understandable but arbitrary, roads to creative responses are blocked or hidden from view. Everyone is reverting back to the default: a committee.

And now, oh such irony, I find myself part of this committee which will meet every day between now and December 2nd when the solution or recommendations are due.

Funny that on the way to and from the ministry we talked about the transformation of Kabul by its new mayor, who appears to be led by a vision and had brought many people along with him. He is standing up to bureaucrats who are trying to trip him (saying, let me clean up and fix Kabul first and then you can tie me up).

I am told by an insider in the mayor’s office that he is working with the same staff and pay grades as his predecessor yet people actually get things done (and we are there to witness). The paradox is that the work is aspiration-driven while in the process many problems are solved.