As I was preparing for this call, I was reviewing the week that went by and went through different conversations that I had with people. There seemed to be a pattern. I was talking to somebody about travelling around the world and he was telling me that when he was at the immigration desk at a foreign airport, the officer took his passport and asked him to go into the next room. There he was told, "Give me $50 and I'll let you enter." He told them that he had paid for the visa but this guy basically wanted a bribe. When he asked them, "What if I don't give it?" he was told that he would be back on the next flight. The man was so shocked at the corruption that existed even at entry points into countries.
Another conversation centered around the number of rape cases against women. This person said, "While we are all so obsessed over the Nirbhaya rape case in Delhi, one forgets that it was only a little part of the rape that is going on all across India." One very sobering statistic is that every 10 minutes a girl is being raped in India. What a terrible statistic! While you and I are on this call, there's a girl being raped.
Then I had another conversation about the abandonment of girl babies. This morning I came across this article by Adeela Naureen and Umar Waqar entitled 'India, Rape and Trash bin Babies'. In it they talk about how girl babies are abandoned each year because people don't want girls in their homes. Also there is an increasing number of abortions, about half a million every year.
All of this sobered me a bit. My wife who is a clinical psychologist, at one time worked at rehabilitating girls caught in the sex-trafficking trade. One of the girls who were rescued, looked into my wife's eyes and said, "Where were you when I was taken from my home? Now it doesn't matter. I've been abused; I've gone through every kind of physical torture. Now who cares?"
I remember watching a film by PBS that had a very poignant title. It was a phrase spoken by one of the trafficked girls – The Day My God Died.
As I read about this, I was wondering where we all come in this kind of a world. What is it that we are called to do? Is it enough that we go to work, do the best we can in that environment, bring home a paycheck, we look after our family? Or is there a greater work that needs to be done? I really don't think it has anything to do with us not caring. I don't think its callousness on our part. I don't think we've reached the point where we're so inhuman about the things around us that we don't care.
Bill Gates said in his commencement speech that he made at Harvard University almost 5 years ago, "The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity." That is so true! When we look at situations, they seem to be so overwhelming, so complex, that we don't know where to start. It's not that we don't want to start, but we don't know where to start. Bill Gates continues, "To turn caring into action, we need to do three things: we need to see a problem, see a solution and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps."
When you think about complexities, you realize how complex even our work environments are. You and I work in environments that are so complex, where complexities are constantly coming against us, acting as barriers to even getting work done. Things have changed so much in the last 70-80 years when Ronnie Coase who won the Nobel Prize for Economics for an essay that suggested that we do everything that we are doing in terms of making it into one kind of a firm for scalable efficiency – it costs less to coordinate activity within a firm than across independent entities. And yet, that scenario has moved so much. Today it's not about one place; it's about a complexity that has come into the workplace.
I was reading this article about 'Managing Complexities in Global Organizations'. They say that the reasons for complexities are four-fold:
1. Increased interdependence – everything is connected and everyone is connected to each other. We are no longer independent people.
2. Diversity – different cultures come together to work, there's more variety in management systems. Everything is so diverse; it's not linear any more.
3. Ambiguity – there's so much information but too little clarity to try and find a pathway through all of that.
4. Flux – things are changing and evolving so rapidly that just when we think we have a solution, it's changed because of other variables that have come in.
Given all these complexities, how is it that we ought to work in our situations? Again, I want to go back to Bill Gates. He says, "When you try to solve complexities, there are 4 steps that are involved.
· Determine a goal
· Find the highest impact approach
· Find the ideal technology that can be used
· Measure the impact of the work and then share it.
He then draws from the amount of work that he has done in the whole area of the AIDS epidemic. The goal in this situation would be to end the disease. The highest impact approach would be prevention. The ideal technology would be to develop a vaccine. But till then, get people to avoid risky behavior. Finally, measure the impact of the work and share it. It's so important to be able to measure the change that has come so that you know that there has been a good change in that situation. And then share it so that people around you can begin to be a part of it.
But coming back to where I started, it's so important for us not to be myopic in our thinking. Even as we look at our corporations where we work, it's so important to be able to think beyond us.
Gates continues, "I learnt a lot here at Harvard about economics and politics. I got great exposure to advances being made in the sciences. Humanity's greatest advances are not in its advances but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequities. Reducing inequity is the highest human achievement."
I really think that's what we need to do – look beyond the things that we are doing in our workplaces and say, "Can I take what I am doing here and use it to help change the world around me." "One of the reasons this has failed so miserably is that the people who need to bring change have no power in the market and no voice in the system," says Gates, "and the result is that children die."
The question for us this morning – Can we bring change? Can we look at the complexities that face us and say, "This is not going to happen, not on my watch"?
Our Holy Scripture says in Luke 12:48, "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded. And from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked."
All of us have given so much, been entrusted with so much. Let's make it count, my friends.
Let me pray with you. Almighty God, on each one of these precious ones on this call, pour Your Spirit that we may see through Your eyes today, that we may hear the things that You hear, that we may be able to feel the things that break Your heart and be able to walk in that direction and be agents of change, not forced into oblivion because of complexities, but being willing to lean on your wisdom to overcome those complexities and make a change. We ask all of this in Jesus' precious name. Amen.
• Adeela Naureen & Umar Waqar, "India, Rape & Trash bin Babies," http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/columns/30-Mar-2013/india-rape-and-trash-bin-babies
• Bill Gates' commencement Speech, 2007 http://harvardmagazine.com/2007/06/bill-gates-harvard-commencement-address
• "Managing Complexities in Global Organizations," http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/d38ba8ea-d933-11db-9b4a-000b5df10621.pdf
• Bible quote: Luke 12:48 "From whom much is given...."
"The Day my God Died," Trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYus5EEY4L4
No comments:
Post a Comment