GOING BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY!

31^st August 2011

My brother who designs bridges as a civil engineer has a saying: Engineers just can’t walk away from a bridge with an analysis or a report. They have to see the problems through to an effective resolution – they couldn’t just submit the report. Engineers should see “every bridge as their personal responsibility irrespective of who designed it or built it!” The thing that keeps them from walking away is “passion and love for what you do.”  In Kaohsiung, the southernmost city of Taiwan, the engineers had picked up longitudinal cracks next to the abutments underneath the deck of one of their bridges. The bridge was 100 meters long and carried extremely heavy daily traffic. The problem was complex and they had not been able to resolve it. He was flown into the city to assess the situation. Twenty Taiwanese engineers looked at him from the ground and pointed up at the cracks and said, “why?” He had no idea what caused it. He asked to be lifted in a one-man lift into the deck box. When he entered alone into the concrete box frame of the bridge he got immediately on his knees and asked God to help him. What came instantly into his mind was a paper he had written many years earlier in Africa on ‘temperature gradients in the transverse direction’. As he lifted his eyes he saw the answer immediately. The repairs that had been carried out on the cracks were actually wrong and were what seriously threatened the bridge.

I have desired to learn something from his love of his work, and the passion with which he approaches it. He does not leave the basics to others. His passion takes him out of his office to the bridge itself. He involves himself intimately with every detail of what will make a bridge a success. Many stories of him going into impossible places and drilling into a wood pilon to obtain the samples he needed to prove that a bridge is about to collapse, is one of the things that has earned him respect in the engineering community. In a manner of speaking: He cares for the safety of a bridge more than he cares about the client’s needs. Though also, he backs his practical exercises with sound mathematical calculations, he thinks beyond the bridge to the lives that use it every day. A few years back, in similar investigative fashion, he had two engineers lower him in a harness above a ravine below a footbridge used every day by hundreds of children, to prove that it was about to collapse. The bridge was immediately condemned, and, we will never know in this instance, the many lives he may have saved from disaster.

We have each been challenged at various times in our lives with the need to go beyond the call of duty!

Fundamental to his approach to life certain elementary principles present themselves:

First, the value of a correct perspective of ourselves! Integral to success is the ability to recognize our own limits. A leader of others, in this sense, would surround themselves and educate those around them to be both zealous in their work and real about their shortcomings. Many today do not embrace this approach, thinking perhaps that they will lose their job if they do so? However, the opposite is usually true: those who are honest about what they can or cannot do display the more worthy attitude of honesty and accountability – they are the ones that end up growing and maturing into successful operatives, or alternatively, being redirected into directions where they can be more effective. No one, if they are a wise leader, wants to lose someone who is both passionate about their work and is honest!

Second, the value of a correct perspective of others. It is not ‘judgmental’ to make assessments of how well or badly others are doing. Such judgments are integral to the success of any project. It requires a strong wisdom to assess progress; in fact, all positive progress depends on it. Assessments enable the right people to do the right things; they enable taking care of what is overlooked in good time. Good leaders will create an environment in their teams that encourage mature assessments that do not disparage people. It is important for a team to work together, but if they do not take stock of their situations regularly, they will create an unhealthy; difficult, and ineffective environment. No one likes to be told that he has not done so well. It takes a commitment to the perspectives of others to engage in this process. Those companies, and entities that do, always benefit, by contrast, those that don’t, usually lose pace with proper progress. The junkyard of corporate companies is filled with former Titans who refused to listen to their own employees, such as Kodak. They continued to foster, as do others today, an environment of internecine warfare, instead of co-operative and honest discussion!

Third, the value of a perspective that goes beyond the task. We might ask: how does one acquire that sense of responsibility? Responsibility is linked to love. The love of what we do grows symbiotically with the desire to see it work. In this way, passion and process walk hand in hand, as does desire and discipline. Wise leaders can begin to develop this attitude in their teams early on in a person’s career, perhaps by showing how it is done’ by communicating and teaching, and by showing that we can achieve success without sacrificing the values of the family; honor; fair pay; respect, discipline, and affirmation.

Fourth, the value of a correct perspective of obstacles. People who are unable to see the problem will not see through the problem, but it takes greater wisdom not to stop at the problem, but to grasp the solution. People can be trained to both see it and to see past it. A friend who raced motorcycles once explained this approach to me. He said, that if a bale of hay was thrown in the path of his racing motorcycle two things should occur almost simultaneously, first, seeing the bale, and second, looking past it – the racer who will miss that bale most times is the one who looks past it and toward where he wants his bike to go.

Fifth, the value of a correct perspective of God. No situation is ever complete until it has been placed before God in our hearts, and to have an expectation of God’s help. God always has a plan and communicates it to all those who open their ears to this possibility. God’s wisdom is the highest wisdom and is thus well worth waiting for. I do not mean here that those who do not lose out, since to believe so, is to ignore the grace, love, and mercy of God always available to all the living. However, also, those who choose to include God in the path of their lives, find a peace within and the strength to go and do things for others previously unknown to them.

Whether it is physical or spiritual bridges we build, let us build them in such a way that they can stand up to the ‘weathering’ of life, and to their task to bear the load of the communities that will travel across them…

Keep on. Loys 110831