Who are they anyway?
"After all, who are they?" is the title of a small book in which the authors, Steve Ventura and BJ Gallagher, with few words and some drawings, show us that in the world of companies "they", "the others", cannot always be responsible for the bad things that happen. Its small size and the brevity with which the message is conveyed are not equivalent to its importance. It left me with this question that, with each passing day, gains more reason to be asked: why do we find it so difficult to take responsibility for something that goes wrong?
Being a person myself, I suffer from that same malady. I too have caught myself countless times lying, inventing, omitting or being politically correct in order to avoid the consequences, often only fantasised, of something that did not go well. It seems to me that we people are not born equipped with the capacity to assume when we have erred or caused harm. Perhaps it is a regionalism, on a planetary scale, or the heritage of a particular religious ideology, even if we are not practitioners, that has left us with an aversion to blame and a tendency to confuse it with responsibility (1).
Take the following story. Imagine a child, at the age of four, handling some kind of toy. Suddenly, one of the pieces of that toy separates from what was until then a whole. There is no possible arrangement, no "u-h-u" or "super three" to save the situation. What does the child say? These words only serve to give you pause, to think about your answer before comparing it with the one I will give next. I imagine you will have answered that the child would say something like, "it broke!" Or, even more explicitly, "I didn't do it!" Some of us never manage to abandon this type of strategy. Others manage, at a cost and depending on the costs, to opt for taking responsibility.
To compound this tendency, we human beings have another extraordinary ability that has the potential to drive us away from accountability. I refer to the ability to explain the same phenomenon with at least two different and correct theories. Let's see: you have in your hand a stone wrapped around your fingers and the palm is facing the ground. You make a gesture so that your fingers extend and the stone hits the ground. Why does the stone fall? Because you dropped it. That's right. Because there is the force of gravity. Right. Two theories. Two theories and both correct. There is, however, one of these theories that exempts us from any responsibility: the second one. Who has never been late because of traffic or because they got stuck in another meeting or on a call? There are also dogs, sometimes without an owner, who like to eat papers where homework has been done. Obviously, and in theory it always looks good, accountability implies that we get involved in the matter and that we do not attribute the reasons to an external entity.
When we are faced with a pandemic, Merriam-Webster's word of the year 2020, such as the one we are experiencing, "they" cannot take the blame or the responsibility. We are left with no excuses and no justifications. We can't rest on the blame of others and that leaves us distressed, typically. But when we think about what is being done or can be done to get us, all of us, out of this situation "the others" come up fast. The year that has just ended has brought us together and literally pulled us apart. For some time now we have been moving away from some and wanting to belong to others. The infamous polarisation is increasingly evident.
It will be no coincidence that the same Merriam-Webster considered "they" the word of the year 2019. Although the reasons for this choice are different, an alternative reading is still interesting: "they" we can blame and hold responsible. In the age of the individualistic individual, always right, others are wrong. However, if the truth is in everyone, individually, it cannot be in anyone. There will be no sharing except by coincidence. Common places become the fruit of chance, of the happy coincidence of perspectives, pushing aside the necessary effort towards integration and complementarity.
Although this is the wish of many, neither history nor memory can be asked to forget a year. Even if that were possible, I find it hard to believe that ignoring a year like the one that passed would bring us great advantages. I hope that 2021 will be a year in which "they" start to be more a part of "us". For that to happen, everyone has to start getting closer.
Written for Link to Leaders on 9 February 2021; published 16 February 2021.
1. Guilt and responsibility are different concepts. A brief consultation of the dictionary may clarify.
