Friday, May 16, 2008 Sula: Solving problems the old fashioned way By Jun Sula Commentary
BOY, am I glad Secretary Arthur Yap finally admitted that we have a rice problem. It's not just about being honest. It's about starting to finally come to grips with the realities. Denial, which is not just a river in Egypt but a nasty, bad habit, can be a monster in the way of finding a quick and lasting solution to our rice headache.
Accepting the problem is only the first step in the journey for resolution.
The Chinese have a wise for it: all journeys, whether in Shenzhen or Wack Wack begin that way. I said wise? You have to be wise to solve a problem, whether it's about rice or a borjer.
Here's a trilogy of tips.
Rule 1: See or look beyond the apparent.
I learned this from a lawmaker-friend from wayback from Samar. At one time, he said, Masbate was hit by a long-drought. Leaders were alarmed. The province was a huge cattle raiser. The cattle mooed and stomped for green grass, but not a blade was seen. It was all brown and bone-dry, and the livestock soon grew thin, emaciated and weak. Many feared they would lose their only source of livelihood if the dry spell continued.
Then someone came up with a novel solution, an out-of-the-box, modern-day crisis managers might well described it. His idea was out-of-this-world and laughable, if not outright ridiculous. Why not put a green-colored spectacle on each and every cow and bull in the province, he said. The spectacle would appear green to the beast and the grass all over will be like succulent fodder.
Desperate for solution, the leaders of Masbate tried the crazy idea, which turned to be one of the sanest in the history of the province. As soon as the spectacles were put on the animals, they started grazing like crazy, so my lawmaker-friend told me.
To make the long story short, he said, every cow and bull in Masbate regained its health, and so did the province's cattle industry.
If it sounded cock-and-bull, you can blame it on the source: a politician.
But you can never underrate the principle or the lesson from this apparent apocryphal anecdote.
Lesson: Sometimes the problem brings its own solution, if you care enough to look closely and behind the obvious.
Rule 2: Name the problem
It's a lot easier or less difficult to solve a problem if you name it.
Is it a crisis, a shortage or a problem? Is it political, legal or mental?
Identifying the problem cuts to the chase, so to speak.
Here's another true-to-life anecdote.
Once in a seminar on cadang-cadang in Bicol, a dreaded coconut disease (the real coconut), an expert said that the main problem was with its carrier, which happened to be an insect. If you get rid of the insect, the disease can't spread. And cadang-cadang is a pretty mean one that can wipe out a whole plantation faster than a typhoon can flatten it.
Now the seminarians were farmers, among them motley of backward planters with Japanese and Chinese sounding surnames from, again, Samar. Let's say for the record that one was a Yamamoto and another Ong. (Samar, in another time, seemed to be like a major foreign tourist destination).
Yamamoto: You say the problem is the carrier, which is an "incheck"?
Expert: Yes, that's right, sir.
Yamamoto: Then, my goodness, let's kill all the "inchecks"!
Ong: (Outraged) No, let's kill all the Japanese.
Cooler heads averted what could have been a third world war.
When sanity settled down, the outraged farmer understood what the problem was and agreed that naming the insect would go a long way in solving the problem.
Lesson: Speaking in clearer terms and shunning jargon and gobbledygook can work wonders in setting aside built-in biases, prejudgments and differences toward a common solution.
Rule 3: Laugh the problem away
Ok, most of the time only the nuts do that. But it really works, in real life.
I had a friend from way back who was so fed up at one time with her husband she thought of committing suicide. The hubby was into big-time gambling, thanks to the new casinos near his workplace.
It started, she said, with simple betting on the "grandes and pequenos" (big and small, amigo).
Pretty soon, he began telling stories about being held-up every payday. Pretty soon, he would seldom come home. She could not take it anymore so she decided that probably the best way to deal with it was with her hands.
My friend thought of three options: drinking poison, slashing her wrist or hanging herself. My friend was a very intelligent person and a great looker, but she was like you and me: human.
If she drank the poison, she was worried she would not look good in the coffin, with all the contortions and twisted nerves on her face. She wanted to die in vanity, so she dropped the first option.
She went to their kitchen and looked for the sharpest salad knife available. Alas, she found that cutting herself was too painful. And she discovered she also had lower tolerance for physical pain than for the emotional.
Aha, she thought to herself, the rope might just be the real answer, quick and irreversible. She searched for the strongest and longest yarn in the cabinet, and she was lucky. Then she put a steel chair on top of a small table, and climbed on it, and tied the rope on a beam by the door, and slid her slender, fragile neck into the crude noose.
The denouement was a few seconds away when the villain of a husband came in right through the door where the near-tragedy was in progress.
He looked up and his eyes met hers. She looked down and her eyes met his.
He knitted his brows, she dropped her delicate jaw. Then he laughed, softly at first, then guffawed to the highest strain his voice could muster. At the sight of her husband in stitches, my friend took her neck out of the noose, came down from her perch, threw the steel chair at her insensitive audience and kicked him and hit him with her fist with all her strength and anger and frustration and slumped by the door as cried her heart out.
Months after, when she told me about the incident, she said she realized that what she attempted to do was ridiculous. And she laughed as she recounted her husband's reaction.
"Maybe I really looked funny, that's why he laughed," she said.
Her husband eventually stopped the vice and lived to be a better husband. She not only lived to tell the story but also learned from her botched "exit" and loved life more.
Lesson: Life is bigger and more important than all the problems we can have, rice included.
