Allegra Jordan: Solving the right problem
“I am not here to educate the children. I am here to give them vision to stop the war.”
– Marguerite Barankitse
Marguerite Barankitse, “the Angel of Burundi,” is one of Africa’s most prodigiously gifted leaders. In the rural village of Ruyigi, Burundi, she built Maison Shalom (House of Peace), into one of the bright lights of Africa. The 16-year old village has helped raise tens of thousands of orphans of war. The village has a chapel, a top-flight hospital, houses owned by the children, a mechanic shop, schools, a morgue, a marketplace, and more surprisingly, a large swimming pool and movie theater. Her efforts have been honored by the Opus Foundation, and two months ago by “The Guardian,” which gave her its first Achievement in International Development Award.
Barankitse is in a rare class of leaders.
Her defining moment came after the massacre of her village. Her mission became to show Christ’s love as an alternative to war. If education, microfinance and swimming pool maintenance could help further that goal, so be it.
From a social entrepreneurial standpoint, Maggy is an example of solving the right problem. Every manager has heard the clichéd question, “Are you in the railroad business or the transportation business?” That question is around well past the transportation revolution because asking the right question trips up a lot of people.
Smart people mismatch solutions to problems all the time. Look at the evidence from highly trained, intelligent people: medical misdiagnoses, manufacturing recalls, new products with little commercial purpose. Go to the Google Gadget page. Google is one of the most successful companies in the world for good reason. Yet how many of these, by my last count, 140,789 gadgets, will anyone you can think of use? The very smart people at Google don’t know if you need them either. They had some ideas, but don’t know which ones will attain popularity, so they’re putting them out there and letting the market decide. They will review, revise, and innovate incrementally.
Understanding what problem you are trying to solve is tough. Sometimes the technology and science are too new to understand the implications. Sometimes people are blind to what is possible until someone shows us a new reality (Did anyone with a fly 1980s boom box really get that the iPod was just around the corner? Customers weren’t asking for it. Steve Jobs of Apple led the market). We may refuse to acknowledge information that does not comport with what we define as normal. A committee may compromise our vision and a once-promising solution turns into a mess. Without a clear vision of the problem, and the knowledge of where to stand firm and what can be compromised, we are less likely to have success with a new idea.
Maggy had the benefit of two Christian practices that helped her to innovate in Rugiyi:
1. A calling. Maggy had a choice. She could have left Burundi. But she decided to stay and rebuild. It wasn’t about careerism. It was a vocation that made more of her.
2. Lament tempered with hope. Christian lament, steeped in the deepest aching sorrow, is a first step to understanding what problem needs to be solved and what cannot be compromised. Lament is not inarticulate pain, but a discipline from which clarity can emerge. The process is outlined in the book of Jeremiah and in Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice’s short book “Reconciling All Things.”
When you are cut to the core and cry to God, only then might you use the short time you have left to become serious about the problem at hand. Combine that with a practice of hunting for stories of hope and storing them.
Maggy asked these questions:
“What experiments must I run to help create a world without disease?”
“What experiments must I run to provide a world without war?”
“What does a world look like without poverty?”
The problems of war, poverty and disease found Maggy, rather than the reverse, and pierced her as if they were the nails of Calvary. She found her calling, took those nails, picked up a hammer and began to pound them into the foundations of Maison Shalom. Fifteen years later she is still swinging at those nails with everything inside her. The world is just now hearing the rhythm of the pounding, which has become for her and a generation of children a new, fragile rhythm of life.
Allegra Jordan is special assistant to the dean at Duke Divinity School.
Lament
Hey Allegra, I'm curious about your comment on lament as an ingredient in figuring out the right problem to solve. Would you want to generalize beyond a setting that's seen the kind of devastation Burundi has and say it's a key ingredient for innovation, say, here?
Lamenting things of all sizes
Jason, thanks for the question.
What gives someone the energy to accurately address a market need?
In business we assess market demand before launching a product. In that process, we should have the energy to ask ourselves "why bother?" and "even if my logic is perfect, could I be dead wrong about the opportunity? How do I check my reasoning?"
I believe this is a very pale reflection of the lament process. Energy in a lament comes from being so hurt we don't want a situation repeated. We'll try to learn what happened and be very honest about solutions because we do not want a repeat performance of what just happened to cause us such sorrow.
A more modest social needs assessment could be: child comes to school and is fidgety but just on Mondays. You tell the child to shape up. Or take medication. Or, if you have even more interest, you may investigate and learn that the child had nothing to eat over the weekend. The solution might be a backpack given on Friday filled with food to carry the child through the weekend.
Taiichi Ohno, the creator of the Toyota Production System is famous for "The Five Whys." He said, "ask why five times" and you will find the root cause of most problems. (This week is tough to invoke Toyota on quality but for decades it's been a good bet!) I'm not suggesting that asking why is theologically helpful. Managerially, asking why is essential - but it requires the energy that comes from wanting to address something that is missing.
Lament and Innovation
Thank you Allegra for your provocatively hopeful article, and Jason for your provocatively imaginative question.
I hadn't myself thought of a connection between lament and innovation, but I believe there is one, if our innovation is truly Christian. I believe that only true sorrow, a searing, Spirit-induced recognition of how deeply something is "missing the mark", can spur our own imagination to envision and to hope for a transformed, counter-lament reality. Spirit transformed lament is necessary to find the faith to persevere, to overcome all obstacles including those false, premature summits. Our lament has to be as strong as the temptations to settle for anything less than true joy. I suppose that if one were a true saint, one would not need lament as a catalyst. That's a hypothetical I have to leave for others. Grace and peace.
The Holy Spirit
Ted: I like your reflection. And upon reflection humility allows us to realize our ideas, and our energy emanates from a generative, social God. We have a lot of choice of course in what actions we take but we of course need to distinguish between God's creativity and our work in mediating the chasm between what is and what should be. This humililty is most found, I've found in the work of Jean Vanier, Maggy, Angelina Atyam, etc. - really amazing saints(and in this case I will exclude N.O. Saints' Drew Brees though it is Super Bowl Weekend and he seems to have some very fine qualities.)
With great power
With contemporary thought process, lament and innovation are almost quantum aspects. I recommend reading a little known paper 'Lament of the impossible" by Christopher Athos. Thank you for this great read.
5 Whys, Faith
Yes, the commenter is correct - the 5 Whys has applications beyond just manufacturing or business. It's a method to get below the surface - beyond symptoms. It can indeed be applied to issues of faith and reason.
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