Update on ProVention Global Forum, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Feb07 , by Taye Yadessa, World Vision Ethiopia and representing ECB

The pro vention forum and Dar es Salaam

 By Taye Yadessa

Dar es Salaam of Tanzania was the city chosen to host the 3^rd round global workshop on Disaster Risk Reduction. I was very ebullient to be participating in this forum held on February 13 - 15, 2007.

The weather, I found it to be hotter than Addis Ababa, and as I was looking around I remember saying to myself this must be the hallmark of nature - a place to enjoy life from a whole new different angle.

As the workshop was underway I was overwhelmed to realize and look in depth at the death toll of disasters from different hazards, putting precious human lives and livelihoods in devastations. In retrospect and to revitalize the current on going tendencies, however, the workshop gave me insight on how to get over the ghastly nature of disasters by giving alternative adept mechanisms so that humanitarian emergency affairs and risk management are indispensable ...confronting face to face with risks.    

At the end of the workshop I was able to say to myself that my expectation has been met. From the workshop I drew a sense that "any crisis would come out with opportunity" if it is tackled with techniques, skills and/or ideas that take local contexts into consideration.

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Immune to Change?

Everyone knows that organizational change is hard. The authors of a book I’m reading argue that change ventures fail for the same reasons that the new year’s resolutions we make fail: each of us has within us an inbuilt resistance to change, similar to the immune system’s resistance to disease. Like the immune system, this internal change-fighting mechanism exists for a purpose: to maintain an equilibrium between the often competing commitments that we hold (I assume not having this equilibrium would make us fall off into the deep end in all sorts of dangerous ways). For example, a manager who is openly committed to helping his or her staff take more initiative, may be privately committed to not having his or her staff feel abandoned – the two commitments contradict and equilibrium is maintained by our change-resisting machinery. In short, no changes take place. I condense several pages of discourse here but you get the picture…

 

Is this painfully obvious or just plain confusing? Regardless of what you think I think you’ll agree with this quote – “It is possible to throw all kinds of personal and leaderly initiative at this dynamic equilibrium, often resulting in apparent change (losing ten pounds, realigning corporate attention), but the process of dynamic equilibrium eventually just throws out its enormous arms in response and before long waves itself back into familiar, upright balance (we regain the weight; the organization returns to business as usual)” (How the Way we Talk Can Change the Way we Work, 2001).

As for the remedy proposed by the authors, it’s all about understanding this other immune system and using seven new languages for individual and corporate transformation. May sound like pop psychology but I found it eye opening. The book is of the kind that resists skimming. You have to actually go through some of the exercises. I did one and felt the true meaning of learning by doing; I skipped others and felt I’d cheated myself when I raced ahead to the conclusions.

If interested, you can request the book from the ECB library –and that will motivate me to finish it faster!

Malaika

 

 

 

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