Sylvia's Journal

I am back on the road, after 2 months on the ground, something that is rather rare. I am off to warmer places, a welcome change after the intense cold spell in Massachusetts.

I nearly forgot the routine. Luckily I put my face masks in my hand luggage at the last minute because I have never been on a plane with so many coughers and sneezers, including my neighbor.  I pressed the mask tightly on and only lifted it for drinking sips of water and taking my meals, so there were some breaches; fingers crossed.

I waved my breakfast in the plane in order to leave room for the much better offerings in the KLM lounge: beschuit met kaas, beschuit met hagelslag, poffertjes and speculaas koekjes. This is where I get my fix of Dutch goodies not available in the US.

I am off on a combo trip: first two weeks in Rwanda where I last landed in 1992. It is a different country now, in many ways, traumatized still, I presume. How could one not, with the generation that survived the slaughter still alive, and adults with unspeakable memories from childhood. And then there is the language, from French to English, although I am told there are still plenty of (older) French speakers around who struggle with English.

I am facilitating the launch of a new project that is actually not all that new, a follow-on of the previous one that we also held, and so many staff continue on, with some new employees and new partners.  We will hold this workplanning retreat off site, some 100 km from Kigali in a place called Gisenyi, on the border with the DRC. I was there too 23 years ago.  We walked across the border into what was then Zaire to experience super-inflation: 2.5 million Zaires, the currency then, bought me a tube of toothpaste. I still have a few of the million Zaire bills, kept as a souvenir of a different era. I also have some Rwandan money from that time.

In my second week in Rwanda the project staff will sit down with its government counterparts and go over their plans to make sure everyone is aligned and expectations can be met.

After that I will fly to Nairobi for a short stay to meet a new hire, the woman who will take over my role as Global Technical Lead for leadership and management. I hope that the new energy she brings and her new ideas will enrich us. I have, after all, been at MSH for 28 years and an injection of something new is called for.

From there I will go to Addis for a brief orientation of ICRC coordinators to prepare them for their role in a senior leadership program that will kick off after my surgery, when I am allowed to travel again, sometime in April.

On my trip home I discovered that there are people who buy cheap tickets and fly very far in order to get to the next tier of their frequent flyer status. My neighbor flew to Nairobi via Dubai to arrive on Friday night and leave on Sunday evening just before Thanksgiving, and will repeat this right after. With that he hoped to achieve the highest level, diamond. In back of us were other people who also made trips for the miles.

I asked what he did while in Nairobi. It seemed not much. He bought a book, which he was still reading, sat by the pool and he may have seen the giraffe park. I suggested he pay a visit to Nairobi national park on his next trip.

He asked me whether I got upgraded to business class with my diamond status. I told him no, I never was and that the most important perk, priority lane, was already available with gold.  Other than Axel getting a companion gold status (but he never travels) and a few extra miles, there wasn’t much difference in benefits between gold and diamond.

I arrived in an overcast Massachusetts and a windy Lobster Cove and unpacked the goodies I brought back from Ethiopia and Holland. It had required a whole extra bag to check, filled with coffee beans, cheese, corenwijn (a kind of jenever), licorice and chocolate and some Saint Nicholas candy that will have to wait until Christerklaas evening on December 24.

On the flight from Amsterdam to Nairobi I watched a two hour documentary on the ten year renovation of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It is a tale of perseverance, human frailties, citizen input, ingenuity, and, most importantly, the difference between ownership and buy-in.

With our governance work we talk a lot about listening to the voices of the people, as if that is easy. The Rijksmuseum documentary shows what you have to be prepared for when you invite those voices in – in this case the voices of the bicyclists – and I can see why people prefer not to bring those voices in as it complicated matters beyond belief.

If your focus is on buy-in, rather than ownership, then the choice seems to be about anticipating a brief and intense outcry when all is said and done or an agonizing and drawn out process of arguing and trying to convince the other side, which in Amsterdam took 10 years and contributed greatly to increased cost and delays. The conflict was eventually resolved, all parties are happy now, but the price was high. If anyone calculated the costs and looked at the pros and cons of inviting the voices of the people in, I am sure the cost-benefit analysis would counsel for ignoring potential opponents and deal with the outcry later when things cannot be changed anymore. Eventually, one may expect, people get on with their lives and the protest will die down, except for a few very vocal people who may continue to speak up.

I am a fervent proponent of listening to the voices of those affected and involved to avoid problems down the line. The documentary showed clearly why we should never go for buy-in if we can go for ownership from the get go.  Getting buy-in is selling. In a highly politicized environment such selling tends to pit groups against each other into adversarial roles, amplifying parochial and narrow self-interests.

Getting ownership starts with the creation of a shared vision where everyone can see that their interests are recognized, even if not fully realized, but this for the sake of an overarching aspiration that everyone wants. The documentary shows why going for buy-in later is always more difficult (and very costly) than co-creating in the first place.