Sylvia's Journal

I concluded today that I have been tasked to cross extremely difficult terrain in a car with defective steering, four flat tires and dirty oil. Last week I kicked that car and it came apart. The car got mended and today I lost my temper and kicked it on the other side, leaving a big dent. We’ll see what falls apart next. This is the story of my work here. I don’t think I can get from here to there in the vehicle made available to me. I mean ‘vehicle’ figuratively of course.

There’s more that is not right. I love to teach and I am very good at it but there is little room for me to teach the things I am passionate about. For many what I want to teach is secondary, or fluff. I want to help people design better meetings, teach how to manage power dynamics. It’s partially self interest (or, as they say here ‘cooking my own kebab.’)

I have a very low tolerance for sitting in badly conceived and facilitated meetings that waste every one’s time. I walked out of such a meeting today and threw my hands up. My preventive work as it relates to design and facilitation doesn’t appear to be very effective. Sometimes I get to correct course in midstream of a meeting, when there is a crisis and people notice that the meeting is about to derail or has already done so; when a few people dominate the meeting and influence the outcome in a less than democratic way.
But these are retrofitting or emergency operations that I prefer to avoid because they are awkward and never really coherent, and if they fail I have egg on my face.

So I am spending most of my days managing my own teams and their staff, and being part of the senior management team. I am extremely busy with internal project management tasks and other things that are not really my area of expertise or passion. I have a team under me that manages millions of dollars of pharmaceuticals, calculating, ordering, shipping, negotiating exemptions and other bureaucratic hurdles, custom clearing, distributing, monitoring and fixing problems. I know nothing about any of this. Luckily I have a good team and they do fine with or without me. I am called in when there are morale problems but even those are mostly managed without my interventions, Afghan style.

I have another team that has advisers who work on technical issues I also know little about: child health, public relations, environmental health and my third team is not a team, but a one-man show, an all-eggs-in-one-basket kind of thing.

Tomorrow the parliament will open and our area is already swarming with armed men in pickup trucks. The main access road to our office will be blocked off. As a precautionary measure we are told to stay home. This is a good thing so I can fill up my depleted patience reservoir.