Chaordic Columns | Blog
| This is Broken / We are Broken - vrijdag 3 juni 2011 |
Recently I was invited by my good friend Tatiana to watch a video that featured Seth Godin reflecting on failures in marketing and design. His story was titled "This is Broken".
A call center or customer service, such as T-Mobile’s for example, is not broken because the center or service self-destructed. It is actually broken because the employees, managers and leaders of T-Mobile broke it, or maybe even designed it as a very fragile thing in the first place wherefore it breaks easily. It’s only a matter of time to see it to break for good.
After coming to this point of insight, I started to pay more careful attention to behavioural patterns of myself and fellow humans and how we’re breaking things all the time, in both our professional and personal lives. It made me wonder why. Are we such a destruction-driven species that we actually blossom and grow, when we get to break it?
My son asked me the other day - when we were in one of those infamous Dutch traffic jams - why it is that when we are in a traffic jam we’re always the last car, all the way in the back? Although his observation made me laugh at first, it also made me realise that traffic jams are another example of something that we break ourselves. In some cases it might be an accident or the lack of enough asphalt that are the cause of the problem. Nevertheless, the majority of traffic jams is caused by human malfunctioning. It’s exactly that perception of my 4 y/o son that’s at the source of the problem. The assumption that ‘a traffic jam has a beginning and an end, and that you, by switching to the lane that is driving slightly faster than the one you’re currently in, can actually get to the front of the traffic jam sooner and therefore escape it sooner’ is a developmental short-circuit of our brains. Did you ever notice that no lane ever drives faster than the others for more than a few seconds and then strands,….that’s because so many of us are shifting to that lane, wherefore a new lane gets to speed up. Etcetera.
One more observation: I was walking in our little neighbourhood mall a few weeks ago and discovered a garbage bin to be on fire and smoking. Yes, someone broke that by throwing in a burning cigarette probably. On purpose or out of blindsightedness? It doesn’t really matter. What I found much more interesting was to see that at least 10 people passed by the burning bin, complaining about the smell and the smoke, and continuing their journey unchanged. Why did nobody go to a shop and get a bucket of water? After having done this myself - together with two other ladies who showed up soon -, I couldn’t resist the temptation and asked one of the passers-by why he hadn’t done anything. It was not his bin, he answered. "I didn’t put it on fire”, somebody else reflected. And the third contribution to the conversation I actually found most shocking: "That’s what you have firemen for”.
Both examples, the traffic jam and the bin, but also many of the stories of Seth Godin, or my own experiences in team and organisational development have made clear how I understand this now: we as human beings need to learn (again) to discern between "instant self-interest” and "systemic self-interest”. By focussing on an immediate gain, we tend to break stuff (even more). By putting our focus and attention on the (near) future, we can actually 'fix' the system, which will eventually satisfy the self-interest of everyone, only slightly later, and perhaps in a different form than you anticipated.
There's an irony to "immediate self-interest" thinking.
For everyone who drives in traffic jams every now and then: the three seconds of gain by switching lane constantly, make the traffic jam only worse wherefore it lasts longer and you’re in it longer.
For everyone who works in a call center or at a customer service (or is responsible for them): by not helping a customer and sending them onwards in the system, you’re not making them happy, satisfied customers. They’ll quit as clients eventually, wherefore your employer earns less and less and in the end needs to cut your job. And also, your colleagues will not be pleased, they’ll continue to send annoying customers onto your desk as well, rather than helping them themselves and easing the workload for you….
For everyone who ever notices a trash bin on fire: put it out yourself before it puts your shopping mall on fire and you don’t have a place to buy groceries anymore.
Think systemically. Be chaordic and experience how sacrificing instant self-interest will result in a delayed, but a whole lot more sustainable and life-affirmative, satisfaction of your self-interest. In the (near) future, when the other humans - in the same system - have caught up.
Where 'instant self-interest' provides immediate self-gain, it causes self-pain in the longer run. And, where "systemic self-interest" requires a (sometimes painful) effort at first, the reward will be one that lasts.
Being 'systemically self-interested' implies the human ability to see yourself as part of a larger whole, to understand how your behaviour effects the healthy flow of that whole, how that counts for everyone, and to choose to postpone, but not negate, your self-gain and to accept that gain might come in a different form than you expected at first.
Responses:
| Just glad that someone is writing about the absurdities of everyday and just absurd how people are. I'd love to meet the person who said "that's what firemen are for" Rima- 11-06-2011 |
| I am so glad someone is writing about the absurdities n life and about how absurd people can be. I'd love to meet the person who said "that's what firemen are for". Rima- 11-06-2011 |
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