And if you missed it, listen to veteran Canadian journalist Howard Schwartz’s first interview with Allon about “one size for all”.
Waiting-an interview with Allon Shevat
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Author Archives: shevat allon
מיומנות ההמתנה
.אין דבר יותר מתסכל עבורי מאשר ההמתנה
אני מאבד את הסבלנות ברמזור אדום. אני מתעצבן בהמתנה למעלית. אני לא אוהב לחכות לחשבון במסעדה. כששתי מכוניות נמצאות לפניי ליד משאבת דלק, לחץ הדם שלי עולה. וכשמטוס מחכה על !!המסלול חצי שעה (או יותר) ללא הסבר, אני ממש משתגע
זה לא משהו שאני גאה בו, אבל זה מה שזה אבל לחכות זה לא הצד החזק שלי
ועד לא מזמן לא הבנתי עד כמה חמור חוסר הסבלנות שלי עד שביקרתי באוגנדה. באוגנדה מחכים להכל. לעולם אל תסע לאוגנדה אם אתה לא יכול לחכות
גם אם יש לך ויזה אלקטרונית, זה לא אומר כלום; אתה עדיין צריך 20 דקות המתנה לאדם בשלטונות ההגירה, אז תעשה את החשבון אם אתה מספר חמש בתור
כן, יש 4 מסלולי יציאה לעמדת התשלום החניה בנמל התעופה של אנטבה, אבל שלושה מהם חסומים. היציאה משדה התעופה אורכת 90 דקות
המלון נמצא רק 12 ק”מ מהמלון שלך? לֹא! זה מרחק שעתיים וארבעים דקות
הזמנת כריך בשעה 19.00? השעה רק 20.00
האם אתה רוצה לשלם את החשבון שלך? אנא המתן, ה”מערכת” מושבתת; תחזור בעוד עשרים או ארבעים דקות. צריכים לתפוס מעלית? עלה במדרגות.
.וכן הלאה וכן הלאה
!כמעט הטלתי ביצה מהמתנה
בניגוד אליי, אוגנדים מחכים בסבלנות. כמעט בלתי אפשרי להאמין כמה סבלניים רוב האוגנדים (לא !!!כולם). הם לא ממצמצים עין בפקק של 4 שעות
הם מבינים שמעט מאוד ישתנה אם הם יתעצבנו. זו הגזמה. הם למעשה מבינים ששום דבר לא ישתנה אם הם יתעצבנו; במקרה הטוב, הם יהרסו להם את היום. לפיכך, יש מעט מאוד לחץ באוויר שכן התפיסה היא שזמן הוא משאב בלתי מוגבל
ההמתנה זה לא רק עניין של סבלנות. זו גישה, הלכה למעשה. המתנה אינה בהכרח גישה של כניעה. זוהי קבלה של המציאות, שימור העצמי.
אם יש תשתית לקויה וכל מה שאמור לקחת שעה יכול אורך חמישה ימים, מה זה עוזר לאבד את הסבלנות
כשמוזונגו (ילד או ילדה לבנים) מאבדים סבלנות, ההטיות התרבותיות שלנו צפות אל פני השטח במהירות רבה. המוזונגוס רוצה שדברים יעבדו כמו שצריך; אם הם לא עובדים כמצופה, יש לתקן אותם. עַכשָׁיו. הציפייה הזו מוזרה לאוגנדה. העולם שלהם לא מתנהל כך. כשמשהו לא עובד, יש לשמור על שפיותך. כפי שוולטר קרונקייט נהג לומר, “ככה זה
לפני הטיולים שלי לנמיביה ולאוגנדה, חשבתי ש”פשוט חסרה לי סבלנות”. הניסיון האפריקאי שלי לימד אותי שאני צריך לרכוש את המיומנויות והעמדות התומכות בהמתנה”.
זה לקח עצום לעיכול. ואני רוצה להשתפר הרבה יותר ביכולת ההמתנה. מעולם לא חשבתי שאי פעם אודה בזה
The Skill of Waiting
There is nothing as frustrating for me as the act of waiting.
I lose my patience at a red light. I get upset waiting for an elevator. I do not like waiting for a bill in a restaurant. When two cars are ahead of me at a gas pump, my blood pressure goes up. And when a plane waits on the runway for half an hour (or more) with no explanation, I am fit to be tied.
It is not something I am proud of, but it is what it is but waiting ain’t my forte.
And until recently, I did not understand how severe my lack of patience is.
Then, I visited Uganda. In Uganda, you wait for everything. Never go to Uganda if you cannot wait.
- Even if you have an e-visa, it means nothing; you still need 20 minutes processing per person at immigration, so do the math if you are number five in line.
- Yes, there are 4 exit toll booths at Entebbe airport, but three of them are broken. Exiting the airport takes 90 minutes.
- The hotel is only 12 km from your hotel? No! It’s 2 hours and forty minutes away.
- Did you order a sandwich at 19.00? It’s only 20.30.
- Do you want to pay your bill? Please wait, the “system” is down; come back in twenty or forty minutes. Need to catch an elevator? Take the stairs.
And so on and so forth.
I almost laid an egg from waiting.
As opposed to me, Ugandans wait patiently. It is almost impossible to believe how patient most (not all) Ugandans are. They don’t blink an eye in a 4 hour traffic jam.
They realize that very little will change if they get upset. That’s an exaggeration. They actually realize that nothing will change if they get upset; at best, they will ruin their day. Thus, there is very little stress in the air since the perception is that time is an unlimited resource.
Waiting, I learnt, is not only a matter of patience. It is an attitude, a weltanschauung as it were. Waiting is not an attitude of surrender necessarily. It is acceptance of reality, a preservation of self.
If there is poor infrastructure and everything that should take an hour can take five days, what good does it do to lose your patience?
When a muzungu (white boy or girl) loses patience, our cultural biases float to the surface with great speed. The muzungus want things to work; if they don’t work as expected, they need to be fixed. Now. This expectation is strange to the Ugandan. Their world does not operate that way. When something doesn’t work, suck it up; preserve your sanity. As Walter Cronkite used to say, “that’s the way it is”.
Before my trips to Namibia and Uganda, I thought I “just lacked patience”. My African experience has taught me that I need acquire the skills and attitudes that support “waiting”.
That’s a huge chunk to digest, for me anyway. And I want to get much better at waiting. I never thought I would ever say this.
How technology changes national traits: a simple example
Rav Kav means “many lines”
There used to be a special and culturally unique way of dealing with bureaucracy in Israel. Technology has destroyed it.
A “rav kav” is a card which serves as a method of payment for public transportation on trains, buses and shared yellow taxis in Israel. It is akin to an Octopus card in Hong Kong, a Nol card in Dubai or an London Oyster card.
At the age of 75, people exchange their rav kav for a card which enables free public transportation, or the card that one already carries can be reprogrammed to stop deducting fares on your upcoming birthday.
Doing simple things in Israel is always difficult, and carrying out this procedure is no different. A rav kav service station is located only in 2 train stops, the busiest stations, in the heart of Tel Aviv, at haShalom and Tel Aviv Central.
In the past, Israelis were well known for bending rules, breaking rules and by-passing the system. Israeli could invent by-passes for almost everything as long as there was good will and/or knowing the right people, the latter was called Vitamin P, for “protection”.
Rav Kav is highly automated. Change can only be made 14 days before one’s birthday in the case of reaching the 75 year old goal post.
I arrived at the Rav Kav service centre 16 days before my birthday. I waited in a long line; I am not known for my patience. When I reached the booth, the service provider was sending WhatsApp and had an earphone in one ear. In a thick undetectable accent (but probably Transylvanian) , he told me to come back in 2 days.
I asked him if he can “do me a favour” and enter the data now. “System is blocked; no more “Israbluf” (beating the system). Next!”
The “system” vanquished the cultural trait of beating the system. The sad part is that most of the systems are either down, or serve as a Berlin wall preventing the use of common sense.
Technology is flattening us all into one boring lump. And we are all becoming the same: dull as piss on a plater.
Interview with Allon Shevat
In this podcast, veteran broadcaster Howard Schwartz interviews me. Howard was a well known broadcast journalist for two decades, a corporate communications consultant and consumer advocate. He can reached at mediaman2000@att.net
Transcript available.
Tough Times
Misbehaving children in the air raid shelter make as much noise as the missiles and/or Iron Dome exploding overhead. And they are just as annoying.
Just look at the parents of these noisy brats gawking at their cellphones with a zombie look on their face as their kids imitate the sirens, even after the sirens themselves have ceased splitting the air and piercing eardrums. What don’t they shut their kids up, or go out of the shelter to watch the missiles land?
The government sure knows how to make loud sirens, and collect taxes. Too bad they did not know about Oct 7th.
The air in the shelter swelters with sweat, farts and dampness. It is too early to get out of the shelter as the order is to stay in the shelter until further notice. Christ, George just pissed on the floor of the shelter. He is recovering from a broken toe, and to make matters worse, he is 15 years old and suffers from canine dementia.
I run upstairs, get some paper towels, clean the mess amid the boom boom boom of incoming missiles. I then take the elevator up to my apartment, foregoing the protection afforded me by the shelter. Fuck it; I prefer the silence to the safety cum noise.
Later, I learn that there was a direct hit 1.5 km from my home.
In 1968, this was the choice that I made…I mean the choice I made to live here. In 1917, my grandfather’s brother and sister, Ida and Jack, also made this choice. Could it be genetic?
It is a choice that I never regret. Not for one second. “You and your Jewish holidays”, said our music teacher Ms. Bergstrom, moaning that the Jewish students did not attend class in September. “Who takes the Jew?”, referring to me as teams were formed in a football club. Quebec was a cruel place to be in the 1950’s once you put your toe outside the Jewish suburbs on Ville St Laurent or Cote St Luc.
Not regretting a decision certainly does not mean that this is a walk in a park on a sunny day. Well, not on a sunny day-the latest news is that I need to stay out of the sun, and I do not plan to challenge that advice which my dermatologist gave me.
Could the heartburn be a symptom of the stress? Certainly not. I am but 75 years old. I’m not that old! Or this is getting to me?
Is the stress accumulating to a point where it is almost intolerable?
The stress is intolerable, no doubt. Taubman’s book on Khrushchev is superb. I have just ordered a biography of Beria. I need to dig into the Soviet leadership a bit more. And the cinema club in Tel Aviv, what’s on next week?
And I splurged on a new Kindle!
Teamwork is not harmony or lovey-dovey
“We had a 2 day session to improve teamwork. It consisted of a cooking class, feedback sessions and an exercise. Huge waste of time”.
There are a few misconceptions about teamwork I want to debunk.
Teamwork is not achieved by rallying around a mission. Mission statements are great products that sell well in the OD/Business consulting domain, and they have strategic value. Yet they are often too vague to mean anything when it comes down to issues of how to deal with team members who come from different disciplines.
Teamwork is not achieved by harmony. Teams are not a choir. Senior teams consist of domineering people with a high need for power, who are building their career, often to the detriment of others. In a senior team, there is no love lost between team members. It’s a battle of egos, clash of careers, a blame game and vying for attention from the boss and board.
Yet teamwork is a critical success factor without which organizations cannot minimize the over optimization of subsystems, which often throw teams off the cliff. Without teamwork, daily corrective actions are impossible because of mud-slinging such as long email threads on nonsense.
Teamwork is achieved by the distribution of power between team members that make cooperation worthwhile. When team members cannot bulldoze over others, and when constant escalation no longer works due to overdosing, team members will cooperate.
The most important derivative of this point is view is: ensure that short term interests between functions are aligned resulting in coalitions, and work with the CEO to ensure that power in distributed in a way that serves the tactical and strategic interests of the firm and minimizes pissing contests and overbearing behavior on the part of individual team players.
To illustrate: Head of Software Architecture presents a long term vision of the products functionality that is far beyond the capabilities of the present team, except for him. The R&D manager sets up a next generation team to counter the architect’s proposal. Finance proposes to reduce the number of $ spent on next generation in order to invest more in support. Head of Sales sells lots of new features, way off product roadmap.
What will drive teamwork? Short term goals, eliminating duplicate effort, chopping finances wings, and more involvement of sales in strategic planning. That is a long of hard work-not lovey dovey or formulation of airy mission statements.
Now here is the paradox. When power is balanced, relationships improve due to the acknowledgment of mutual dependencies, no doubt the ultimate goal of any organizational development effort.
PS. Several people have commented to me that strong relationships and bonding are majors enablers of teamwork. No doubt true. But the sustainability of bonding in a team without the proper allocation of power is limited.
The 5 Plagues of Organization Development
Over the last 15-20 years, the profession of Organization Development has been hit by five “plagues”. For the most part, instead of standing its ground, OD has morphed in order to adapt itself, and thus in many cases, rendered itself to the sidelines.
1-Coaching
Coaching focus on the individual, allowing the system problems to get unnoticed, or to get off Scot-free. As such, coaching is the very antithesis of OD, although it masquerades as OD or a subset of OD skills.
2-OD as part of HR
HR is the most conservative of all internal functions in an organization. OD is the literally the police force of the CEO, shamelessly calling itself a business partner. And OD as part of an HR organization? Yea sure, teaching middle management soft skills, and gossiping to bring “feedback” to management, wrapped in endearing terms.
Internal OD is a chicken-shit brigade, serving the status quo, kowtowing to the HR manager, who more often than not feels very insecure in her (or his) role.
3-OD as a Product
OD is a process, an ongoing process, that supports changing of an organization to adapt itself to its various stakeholders and minimize the built in contradictions of organizing. It is not a sellable product such as “Keeping your staff engaged” or “Diversity Week”. But OD is now often packaged as a product, with a label, and a you tube video to see a snippet. Just one problem: it ain’t OD.
4-Mass Production of OD Consultants
Universities and colleges churn out huge numbers of OD consultants, flooding the market with cheap and unskilled labour. Many of these OD consultants end up in recruitment or benefits. Others sell prepackaged crap. And most of the teachers of this new batch of consultants never saw a client in their life. The result-massive incompetence, sold at a cheap price to clients who wake up one day and ask for “a half day on engagement and some fun.”
5-OD’s rigidity
Many of the classical ODers (often over 50) are enamored with a set of beliefs and values which do not support the global configuration of organizations. I have documented this in over one hundred posts on my blog, and have several publications. Thus, some very skilled OD practitioners are stuck in the past-not fully understanding how time has passed them by.
Do you need a survival strategy for your practice? If so, take a hard look at what your competitors are doing, and provide a viable alternative based on a long term, on-going commitment to provide support for the client’s ability to change-without promising miracles or half hour fixes which fake an organizational orgasm, which fades away quickly to boot..
In Praise of the Incongruent
Identifying with ideas on the very right or the very left of the political spectrum have become rampant. Sometimes I feel I’m listening to a script, provided in advance.
Similarly, people seem to have “opinions” which reflect wider social movements rather than more careful contemplation, manifested in such statements as “women make better leaders”, or, “diversity makes organizations stronger” or ” immigration is bad”.
In such a context, incongruity appears to me more of a value than a drawback. Holding incongruent views may indicate that someone is actually thinking, as opposed to parroting, or towing the party line.
Anyone who reads good biographers learns that many people have very incongruent aspects of their personality. Churchill, MLK, Gandhi, de Gaulle, LBJ, Mother Teresa. Their incongruousness are not contradictions, but rather when well explained, serve as a platform for the whole person.
I have held many incongruent stances in my life: I favoured the imposition of the French language on English citizens of Quebec, I believe that many of the core values of my profession are what holds it back from becoming more relevant, I believe that some countries would have been better off today had they been colonized at some point. I supported a two state solution yet also supported extremely harsh revenge for attacks carried out against Israeli civilians.
Far too often, I know what someone is going to say, based on what they have said before on different topics. Not only is it boring, but it shows up the ideology as opposed to the pragmatism/wisdom of the person. Life to me is like French grammar-a few rules and a million exceptions.
So, next time you hear something unexpected or an answer such as “it depends”…you may not want to jump to being overly judgemental.
Some of the teachers that I remember from way back when
I wish I had one thousandth of the descriptive ability of Somerset Maugham so that I could do real justice to some of the teachers I had during grade school (1-7) and high school (8-11).
If only Willie could get his hands on Miss Chesnie (Mildred) for example, who taught history in grade 9. It is hard to decide what was her most salient characteristic: her Scottish accent or her dyed red hair. Often only a few people understood what Miss Chesnie was actually talking about; after class was dismissed, we would try to understand what was our homework lesson. “Make notes on the Cro-Magnon man” was what she said, explained Howard.
In an attempt to knock French into our dumb skulls, we all had so many French lessons that we all should have turned out fluent Francophones. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Monsieur Langlois was sure that the best way of teaching French was to talk only French in class-and as a result, we often understood next to zero. As new technology crept in, we were all put in a French lab, where ¾ of the time, the equipment malfunctioned or we wasted time conjugating verbs. Our French teachers were supposed to monitor us in the lab, but I remember seeing one of them outside in the snow, smoking. Luckily, an affair with Denise T (whom I met skiing) taught me all the French I ever needed.
Now one of our English teachers threatened us that if we did not do our reading assignment, “I will cut off your arms and beat your over the head with the wet end”. Later this poor chap had a nervous breakdown-and I will not, out of respect, mention his name.
For some reason, all the boys were taught metal work. My Dad assured me it would come in handy. The only thing I remember about Mr. Alcock, the metal work teacher, was that he claimed that the “Beverly Shears” is a “great piece of equipment”. Alcock also insisted we call him “sir”.
On the other hand, Mr. Snow, the woodwork teacher, focused on quality. “Do you call that smooth?”, he said as he passed around checking the ashtrays we were making. My Dad told me that “for a kid with two left hands, that’s not bad” when I finally brought something home.
Grade 6 was probably the first year that I was introduced into what is called today Diversity. Our home room teacher was a born-again Christian named Ms. Pert, who insisted that we sing “we are climbing Jacob’s ladder, soldiers of the cross”. Now some of the Jewish kids in the class felt uncomfortable with that, although I didn’t. However, I did not feel ok with any prayer with ended with “thru Jesus Christ our Lord”. Pert would watch like a hawk to see who avoided these words.
During high school, Don Coolbrooke taught us Latin, English and History. Apparently, he was a jack-of-all trades. It is impossible to invent a more boring teacher than Mr. Coolbrooke. In retrospect, he could have been a great anesthesiologist. He had more quirks than Mr. Monk. After school, Wifey would pick him up in a green Pontiac-with a huge dog in the back seat. I remember hearing her say, “hurry up and get in; I’m freezing my ass off”. I shared that information the next day.
Of all the useless things I learnt in school, “technical drawing” beat it all, hands down. Mr. Stacey, a tall, cool, calm and collected guy tried to inculcate us with how to draw and use a slide ruler. I was never very good at that, and I asked my Dad for help. “We did not have that shit in my day”, said Dad smoking away at his Export A and doing his crossword puzzle.
Miss Williamson, the grand librarian of Winston Churchill High, knew me very well. When I walked into the library, she would say “I have something for you”. And she always did.
It was only in McGill when I started to love learning, and as I aged, I loved to learn more and more. However, I am grateful to all those who taught me. They must have done something right.
