Thoughts About September 11, 2001

September 11, 2001 was obviously a day that most of the world will never forget.

I grew up in New Jersey and spent a lot of time in NYC.  My father worked there.  My brother still works there.  I’ve eaten with my family on top of the world trade center in the Windows of the World restaurant.

On September 11, 2001, however, I had already moved into our mountain house in Virginia.  When I heard what was happening in my beloved city, I was glued to the TV like almost everything else.

My initial horror turned into relief as I heard that the NYC fire department was at the scene.  I thought everything would be okay – after all, they’re the best in the world at what they do.

Then the unthinkable happened.  The first tower collapsed.  And then the second.

How can any human being witness what unfolded that day without something profound occurring within them?  

At least, that was my initial emotional response.

But then an email made me realize the status of our society.  I received the noted email 30 minutes after the 2nd tower collapsed, and it  shook me to my core.  I’ll read what it said:

“Do not let terrorism, which is designed to create fear and stop production, halt your life or work.  Stay focused and do not stop what you’re doing.  May God help us all and the decisions we must make.”

I remember thinking “I’m supposed to stay focused?  On What?  I’m not supposed to "stop production?"  I’m simply supposed to keep working and not let this bother me?  I’m not supposed to grieve, wonder, pray – I’m supposed to simply keep doing I’m doing?  What kinds of calloused people have we become? 

What level of event will it take to get us to stop and listen and learn?  

Please try to relate this to where you work, where you live, and even your families.  And please try to consider this:

Failure is the only phenomena of life capable of getting our attention when we’re too busy doing something else.  Nothing else is able to tear us away from the grasp of our own objectives, desires, and goals to force us to look at what we’d rather not look at.

Do you know what “failure” is?  Do you treat it as an ugly, nasty inconvenience?  If so, I’m afraid you are on the road to 911 experiences in your lives.  Because if we don’t learn from the smaller failures of life, those smaller failures are going to turn into larger ones.  Larger and larger and larger until we eventually listen.  Eventually, we’ll all learn what we need to learn.  The only choice we have, it seems, is when.

Let’s learn from the small problems in our lives so we don’t have to experience the catastrophic ones.

Failure is not what we think it is.

Profound Learning

The only path to profound learning is through personal STRUGGLE!

 

Think of a serious incident that you have experienced.  If you are familiar with Failsafe’s approach to Root Cause Analysis (called Latent Cause Analysis), you know that all the people involved in the incident (the “stakeholders”) are required to admit, in front of other stakeholders:

 

What is it about the way I am that contributed to this incident?

Let’s consider a typical example, where a stakeholder might admit:

“I tend to ignore small warning signs, and I know this led to the incident.”

Any of this type of meaningful admission only comes through significant personal struggle.  The stages of the kind of struggle that must occur are similar to the “5 stages of grief:” denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance.  Think about the struggle involved in each of these stages, and the resultant profound change of the person who endures them.

Intellectual, emotional, and spiritual struggle must precede profound personal learning. 

Profound personal learning is almost automatic as we live our natural lives, and normally occurs one-person-at-a-time.  The problem we face in our unnatural industries, businesses, and even societies is in spreading this profound learning from those who have personally experienced it to those who have not.  The spreading of this profound learning MUST occur if we are to avoid industrial and societal catastrophe.  We simply cannot wait for everyone to learn, one-person-at-a-time.

Think, again, of that same serious incident you have experienced and consider the people who were not directly involved.  Are any of the personal learning’s of the direct stakeholders applicable to other people?  For example, does anyone else (asides from the direct stakeholders) “tend to ignore small warning signs?”  The answer is, of course, yes!  All human beings are subject to the same tendencies, to varying degrees.

Whatever is presently true for these direct stakeholders is most assuredly true for many others.

Think about it – a select group of people learns a lot about themselves as individuals, and also as a group, and agonizes over how to spread this learning to people not involved in the incident.  The feeling is almost akin to a religious experience or conviction – an epiphany that is staggeringly important to the individual but who is typically at a loss of how to effectively share it with others.

Most, if not all the time the sharing of this type of profound learning is never considered as part of an investigation.  Consequentially most, if not all the time large organizations experience catastrophic events in different business units, but caused by the same underlying tendencies.

Therefore, isn’t it important, even VITAL for a group of direct stakeholders to answer the following question?

What have we learned that we think others ought to learn so that they can avoid the pain we have experienced?

Are we willing to take the time and expend the energy to answer this question, or will we instead accept the consequences of one-person-at-a-time learning?

If you see the value in the above question, answer it as clearly and bluntly as possible -- in one short sentence.  Break your stakeholders into groups of 5, asking each group to submit one sentence.  Then bring all their suggestions to the front of the room for discussion.  Finally, vote on the one that best captures the profound learning.

But answering this question is not enough!

Merely sending out a mass e-mail, or publishing a large report, or making a business-wide announcement would be like adding a drip of honey into a cesspool.   Therefore, the direct stakeholders must determine how transmit this message to the remainder of the organization in a way that will result in STRUGGLE – agonizing, emotion-filled, gut wrenching STRUGGLE.  Remember the point of this article:

Intellectual, emotional, and spiritual struggle MUST precede profound personal learning.

The more daring the stakeholders are willing to be in the translation of their learning, the more effective the dissemination will be.  One author, relating a similar thought about his book-writing process, stated it in these words:

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible in the attempt to increase the sum of what is possible to think.  Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over – when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not artistically dared….. Salman Rushdie

Paraphrasing Rushdie’s quote to fit this article, “the real risks for any group of stakeholders are taken in attempting to push their learning’s to the limits of what is possible in an attempt to affect the most people.  Learning from things that go wrong becomes a most valuable endeavor of life when the learners go to this edge and risk falling over – when it endangers the learners by reason of what they have, or had not courageously dared to communicate what they have learned to others.”

It is a travesty of the ultimate proportions when personal, profound learning is not effectively shared.