Help turn your community from a beast to a beauty

I dislike all bureaucracies. Radical, freethinking, independent entrepreneurs all tend to detest the restrictive rules and regulations that seem essential to organisational existence. Equally abhorrent is the political posturing and power playing that consumes much of the energy generated by people in organisations. My past profession entailed consulting to organisations. Too often I got to see their shadow side. I saw good individuals, concerned contributors, even outstanding performers crunched by the crosscurrents caused by over-inflated egos, greedily grasping at positions that wield bureaucratic power and privilege. Evil and corruption sometimes thrive in the organisational beast.

On the other hand, organisations provide us with most of the benefits of an enjoyable life. So, we can detect a beauty in the beast! Without the organisations of the automotive, agricultural, oil, wine, clothing, housing, electrical and electronic, computer, communication industries, and a myriad of service industries, what quality of life would we have? Indeed, without the dreaded municipalities and their much-maligned councils, how would the planet’s ever increasing human population manage to distribute life’s mundane essentials such as water, electricity and sewerage and refuse removal? Our planet is now totally dependent on global and local organisations to provide people with life’s essentials.

The beauty of the beast is also very evident in the large number of excellent people who work tirelessly to deliver on the promises of their organisations, large and small. We see this in our neighbourhoods and communities within South Africa. We have wonderful people who work hard to ensure that our communities are more beauty than beast. Many of them are volunteer-based community organisations. We also tend to have a whole range of businesses that bolster our local economy and enrich our lives. What would we do without our general stores, our coffee shops and restaurants, our watering holes, speciality stores, galleries and movie houses?

Those who contribute time, energy, knowledge and skill to ensuring that our communities are a beautiful social and economic organism deserve the unreserved support of every resident. But every community is also a beast with a dark underbelly. Every social organism is! People can be incredibly painful and bitchy, and can spend more of their time focusing on the negatives than trying to contribute to the positives. They can also be very skilled at criticising without ever personally looking to get involved or contributing to finding the solutions. 

A possible antidote to the dark underbelly of any community is to try to define a common vision and set of values that everyone in the community will support (as opposed to specific laws or policies). A well-defined vision gives everyone a common goal to strive for, and a clear set of common values offers everyone a powerful guideline for acceptable behaviour.

 I feel that we as communities don’t spend enough time defining a vision and set of values that are common to all of us. We rather spend our time focusing on the specific issues that divide us. Just like most organisations, we jump too quickly into the specifics before we have thought through, and agreed, the broader vision and value set.

Now I am not saying it is easy to get a vision and value set agreed within a community, but I am saying it is worth the try (if my experience with some of South Africa’s most successful organizations is anything to go by). Why not try it at your next community meeting? You never know, you may just help transform it from a beast into a true beauty.