There has got to be a better way
It’s hard not to be sad today.
To wake up to the news in Dallas can be immobilizing. Without presuming the motivations of the shooter it reinforces in me how we need some of the best minds in the world working on our complex challenges.
We need people from all our sectors coming together, thinking differently about the challenges we face — from their perspective. We need to stop the “othering”. We need to find what we agree on and build on that.
The status quo is not an option. The status quo is quite literally killing us.
In addition to these big challenges the world is facing, I’m trying to make sense of a few things that happened in my small world this week.
I saw a man, who was obviously struggling, in the food court at my workplace drinking the hand sanitizer from the machines designed to clean your hands. He went from machine to machine, poured the liquid into his hands and drank it as if it was desperately needed water. The alcohol was, I guess, what was desperately needed.
I had lunch with an amazing (smart, beautiful, creative) 20-year old who was the best friend of my daughter. We lost our daughter to cancer when she was four, at that time the girls were inseparable. I loved every moment, my heart was able to swell with pride and I made it through the lunch … until I didn’t.
My dad — who thankfully is still healthy and still with my mom, his wife of over 55 years — turns 79 today.
Last night I took an Uber-pool and was enthralled by the discussion on Lamborghinis and celebrity — these are not normally people with whom I would engage in a protracted conversation and their focus was almost entirely on “getting rich”.
My son, who is working at a summer camp with “opportunity youth”, tells me the dream for many of the Leaders in Training is simply to get out of their community. He’s studying sociology at university and is often asked, what kind of job will that get you?
So what does all of this mean? How do we leverage the skills of our great minds to tackle inequality; homelessness; alcoholism; cancer; challenges associated with aging; the focus on money as the ends and the means; poverty?
We start.
We work at the individual, organizational, network and systems level. We create spaces for difficult conversations. We value and place at the core those with lived experience of the issues we need to tackle collectively. We work to change behaviour, attitudes, policies and procedures. We create market opportunities for social disruption. We do it all.
We stop blaming and start solving.
There has got to be a better way and it’s up to us to find it. We can and we must do better.
