11/05/2020
What we can learn from a kid on a jetty, a Leonard Cohen song, an approach to pottery and a couple in Quarantine
Cracks in the Jetty -
Think Wiser When Creating Systems
When I was a kid my family would spend holiday time at Grandma and Granddad’s place in Esperance Western Australia. Holidays for me always meant the best beaches in the world and lots of time fishing from a jetty.
The philosophical mysterious ‘they’ say that:
Anything worth its while in life, is worth waiting for.
Fishing on the old wooden Esperance jetty was like that. Often it would take me a while to catch a fish, not because they weren’t around or weren’t biting, but simply because it took me an age to actually get out onto the jetty.
To a small kid a big jetty can seem like a long walk, even longer when you deliberate over every step because… well because… I feared to step on any of the cracks.
Here I need to make an important point: I was not a really, really thin kid. I was not a will o’ the wisp, a sliver or a speck. I was more a blob: a round kind of kid with freckles on top. There was no chance that any part of me would fall through a crack.
Part of my brain knew that there was no way in the whole wide world that my round body was going to slide through any crack in the jetty boards. Each night before sleep I would tell myself I would wake up the next morning, head straight to the jetty, then straight to the end of the jetty without a hesitation or blink; walking tall, proud and with head held high.
By morning my good resolution and logic would melt into a speckled confusion. Somehow the cracks and gaps on the jetty would haunt me and then the cracks from my brother would taunt me. The more I hesitated, the bigger the cracks became. The more I hesitated the louder my brother would laugh.
It was years after my Esperance childhood days that I discovered the songs of Leonard Cohen and years after that I discovered his song ‘Anthem’. He sings:
There are cracks in everything
That’s where the light gets in
I have learned to love cracks and to try to understand them.
Cohen’s ‘Anthem’ is kind of a tribute song to Kintsugi, the Japanese ceramic art that beautifies broken pottery. In this artform; breaks and repairs are treated as part of the piece’s history. A break is carefully dealt with but rather than hiding the break, the repair is done so that gold, silver or platinum is added to resin and the break/repair is visible and made beautiful.
There is a message in this Kintsugi Art process for how we view things and view breaks/cracks. When a crack appears, deal with it by shining the light on it, rather than living in denial or hiding the crack.
(Or blaming someone/thing else!)
Things crack and even the best of things are not always as they are cracked up to be. Every system has cracks.
‘Cohen Kintsugi’ may become a way for us all to get a little bit better with our thinking, particularly our Systems Thinking.
Nature is made of systems. Our natural body is made of systems. We are a variety of systems within systems within a universal system YET we, human brains, do not seem to do Systems Thinking well.
One of the great challenges of having Systems is to allow nuance, context and compassion. We (humans) often build systems (small s) that are easier to manage - tick a box/binary. The great challenge of Systems (capital S) is to allow and engage the Spirit.
Systems with Spirit allow for context and therefore have compassion, care and consideration flowing within; they are systems of deep empathy. Spirit Systems are Thou not just It. They also seem really difficult for some people who implement Systems. Small s systems appear easier:
They are binary
Yes/No
Tick the box or Cross the box
These things are ‘in, these things are ‘out’
Allowed/Not allowed
Things within the system are treated as a number – an ‘It’ as philosopher Martin Buber wrote in 1923 – rather than treated as a being – a ‘Thou’.
When creating such systems, we (human brains) seem to think things through to a certain level and then leave the rest of the things to sort themselves out or be left undealt with. If you have ever been
on the receiving end of a system that doesn’t cater for you (or your situation) then you will have an inkling of what these means. (Just like the squid ink on the old Esperance jetty, the stain is very visible to you but invisible to those not bothering to look down.)
In 2020 the Coronavirus pandemic has seen Governments, Organizations, Groups… respond by creating processes and systems. Such things needed to be put into place with speed and seemed to be invented on the spot even though we have known that pandemics and ‘black swan’ surprises do happen. We may not know what specific thing (s**t) will happen but we do know that unpredictable things (s**t) will happen!
At the time of writing this, my wife Lindy and I are in Quarantine in a Perth hotel for two weeks. This means we are legally unable to leave the front door of our room and all food, laundry, cleaning materials, rubbish is placed at the front door. The only face to face contact is when Police Officers knock on our door and then step back to talk with us once they can see that both of us are in our room and haven’t walked! (Such a walk could cost us a $50 thousand fine.)
Preceding our hotel quarantine, we had five weeks of trying to get permission to fly across the Western Australian state border from Victoria. It took us five weeks to get permission because our situation did not fit into any of the Tick the Box choices on the Travel Ban Exemption Form. There were boxes for Fly In/Fly Out (FIFO) workers, for medical workers, for government officials… but no box for:
Bought a new home in Western Australia pre-Virus
Sold our Victorian home pre-Virus
The new owners Settlement occurring and them moving in, so we now had no VIC house and needed to get to our new home
Systems with a smaller s, particularly systems that are created with speed, are often only thought through to a certain point and more often than not are not thought through from the Point of View (POV) of the User. Subsequently, some Users are trying to access a system that has made them inaccessible. This system was swamped from the moment it started.
Even Systems that think they have Spirit are often designed for ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’. On the surface this seems logical and of real value. However, it is often the folk who are not in the ‘greatest number’ that are the most vulnerable, the most isolated and the most unrepresented. Therefore, the system does the ‘most damage to the most damaged’. Sigh.
Lindy and I are resourceful and fairly well resourced. We were able to arrange two weeks in a hotel room (that we pay for) in which we have a balcony and the hotel has gone out of its way to ensure we have a decent stay. However, it is not a holiday and it is not easy. We look out onto wonderful parkways with wonderful walk paths, but we cannot walk these parks and paths: we can only walk the carpet track in our room. I’ve always needed a lot of movement to keep my positive chemistry in Flow… so I walk round the bedroom – a lot.
From our balcony we can see other hotels where we know from media reports that more folk are in quarantine, but their rooms have no balcony and no windows that can be opened. This would be tougher. Lindy feels claustrophobic at the best of times and that would not be the best of times.
Two weeks of quarantine and we start to feel:
Criminal
Infected (we are not)
Punished
Trapped
Lindy and I can converse and help each other throughout. We know, in the grand scheme of things, we will do the Gloria Gaynor and ‘survive’. Our situation is far better than many, many others but this doesn’t mean that we fully accept the way we, and others, are being ‘treated’ by the system…
There is evidence that many people in quarantine are really struggling yet the system has not been responding to its own evidence. Things can be done. For example, a special care team of case workers could be set up so that each quarantined person can have a social worker/care person that they can talk with one a day or once every two days. Yes, this would take some time, energy, money to set up but the pandemic has created a lot of unemployment so why not get it to create some employment? Training courses for empathetic people who can be good on a phone – good ears – communicate with clarity and care. I know Lindy and I would feel more cared for (and less forgotten) with this simple addition into our days. For others, it might be as drastic as the difference between life and death.
Thinking through the layers, distinctions and consequences of procedure with depth and empathy of the ‘user’s’ point of view will make a system more contextual and wiser. It can also save a whole lot of heartache, time and the cost of ‘down the track damage’. Smart/wise/deep NOW can save long term cost – emotional, psychological and financial.
Some folk will think that the way of Natural Systems is survival of the fittest but sometimes the fittest is the most collaborative, the most empathetic, the most team player rather than the most ‘kill or be killed’.
In my young mind I thought that the cracks on the jetty were a danger and not a light. A ‘safe jetty’ was an oxymoron like ‘acting naturally’, being ‘clearly confused’ and ‘weirdly normal’. I do not want ‘wise systems’ to be another oxymoron: I want wise systems to breathe and live and be.
Every time we think in systems, every time we create procedure, we need to think it through widely, deeply and empathetically with IT/THOU in Mind, Heart and Spirit. Know there will be gaps and cracks: seek them out. Add resin and gold and make them visible.
Each visible action states: ‘we care’ and exhibits a pathway to wisdom.
Glenn Capelli CSP
Sir Winston Churchill Fellow
PSA Life Member
