Day 33: The death of influence

This morning I paid a visit to the graveyard where my grandmother was buried. She was a very eccentric woman to say the least and insisted on living in her home until the very end. I remember paying her a visit when she was already in the advanced stages of dementia, unable to recognize my father. She was perfectly capable of holding up a conversation but unable to recognize any of us. She lies buried in the Mountain rise cemetery, just outside Pietermaritzburg. Being buried so far away from her family, the grave depends on the local infrastructure and caretakers for its upkeep. I could not find her grave in the end. The whole cemetery is overgrown and the markings are impossible to find. In the end I chose to spend the time quietly with the knowledge of her, if not the physical demarcation of a grave. In some sense this is more reflective of her subtle and pervasive impact through her writing, charity work and call in contributions to home remedy shows. Ultimately, in Africa, all influence is ultimately subsumed into the red soil.

The fading influence of Japan in Africa was such a reminder of the transience of good intentions and influence.  The delegation, in their hyper formalized and impenetrable PowerPoints, dragged the audience through three hours of unintelligible English being red from templatized tracts. The fact is, Japan with its fascinating technology has invested beautifully in ecological good. The problem is though that their proposition is impenetrable.
For western minds, trained on finding the objective and idea as quickly as possible, the endless slides on context and organizational charts (before getting to the meat of their solutions) is tiresome. We are less interested in who endorses the idea that who will do it.

Fantastic technology that can turn plastic bags back into oil, pin point maps of rainfall, agriculture and population growth go unused because the messenger confounds the message. METI's patent on active carbon is still only used in a fraction of the solutions it could bring to health and climate clean up. Their "3L for Africa" investment plan will most likely under deliver because it simply comes across as self interest. They focus almost entirely on the technology they supply without giving real examples of how it will uplift communities.
In stead of burning eyes, passionate about the idea I have bleeding eyes from pixel overload. I feel angry and disappointed at the consequences of this disconnect. But who is to blame? And how does one design for this constraint? Is this any different from inarticulate employees in your company who struggle to bring good ideas to bare. How many times have you personally been frustrated by an inability to connect another mind with the content of your idea? To co-municate.

On the flip side, how many bad ideas have people latched on to just because they are articulately laid out in a dashing display of charisma? As Osama Bin Laden called it: "following the strong horse," which does not mean following the good horse!

As in the graveyard, thickets and wild growth clutter our access to  what we hold dear. How do we move beyond the morass without wielding a blunt machete that could end up doing more harm than good?