The Room Stopped Looking

 

A parable and a confession

Fourth in the Rot and Renewal series.

What follows is a parable, narrated by an old lioness. The mechanics of it are not invented. The tenure lengths, the expulsions, the cubs, the year of nothing: all of it comes from what researchers have documented in the field. Only the voice is mine. Afterwards I will tell you why I wrote it, and where I appear in it.

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The third takeover - the parable

I am old now, and I am still here. That is not a boast. The lionesses are always still here. We are born into this pride, we die in it, and in between we watch the males arrive and leave. I have lived through three takeovers. I want to tell you about the third, because it was the one we could have prevented.

When I was young, the arrangement was so ordinary that nobody thought to describe it. We hunted. We held the ground. We raised what was born. The male walked the border and met whatever came from outside it. That was his work. It was not a small thing. It was one thing.

Somewhere in the years, the language changed. Visitors began to speak of the pride as though he were the pride. When they spoke of us, they spoke of what belonged to him. We did not correct them. There was no meeting where we agreed to stop correcting them. It settled, the way dust settles, and one season we noticed the shape of it and said nothing, because saying something would have required a different kind of courage than hunting.

He got old, which is not a failure. What we did next was the failure.

We began to hunt closer in, so he would not have to travel. We stopped going to the far water. When the young ones asked why we no longer crossed the dry ground, we told them the hunting was better here, and it was not. When he could no longer hold a bull, we brought him what was already dead, and we arranged ourselves so he could reach it first. We never once said the word old in his hearing.

I want to be exact about this, because it is the part I still carry. Our finest collective work in those last years was not a hunt. It was the concealment. We kept from him the one fact he needed most, and we told ourselves this was love.

And every season, we did the other thing.

When the young males grew heavy in the shoulders, they were driven out. They always had been. He drove them, and we did not stop him, and some of us pushed them too. Nobody hated them. It was simply what was done, and it was done on time, every season, with no malice in it at all. Two of them were mine. I remember watching one of my sons cross the ridge and thinking that the season was turning early this year.

So when the border finally needed holding, the animals who could have held it had been gone for years.

They came from the east, four of them, brothers or something like brothers. They were not exceptional. They were four. He went out alone because alone was the only arrangement we had left him, and the thing that arrived at our border was not a handover. It was a conquest by strangers.

Then the bill.

They killed everything under two years old. They did it without anger, over four days, and they were thorough. The half-grown ones ran and did not come back. I do not know where they went. Nobody looks for the ones who run.

And then the strangest year of my life. We did not settle. We did not commit to anything. We mated and did not conceive, over and over, and I have heard young lionesses call this grief. It is not grief. It is arithmetic. You do not raise a cub for a male who will be gone in one season. We spent a year testing whether they could hold the ground, and until we had our answer, we built nothing at all.

They held it. The pride survived. The pride always survives; that is the trick of it.

But count with me. One generation of cubs. One generation of half-grown. One year of nothing built. Three years, gone from a pride that was not otherwise sick.

As for him, he went over the ridge, and he did not take another pride. They rarely do. He died somewhere I did not see.

I have told this story to younger ones who assume the lesson is about him. It is not about him. He was only doing the single job he had, until he could not.

The lesson is ours. We could have insisted on more than one male at the border. We never did, because for many long years, one was easier.

Why I wrote that

That is a story about animals, and I did not write it about animals.

I have spent twenty years inside institutions in this country. Schools, clinics, audit firms, an internet company, organizations that feed people. I have watched more than one of them arrange itself around a single animal at the border, and I have watched the bill arrive. If you have worked in Lebanon for any length of time, you have watched it too.

But I did not write this as an observer, and I am not going to pretend I did.

I have been the male at the border. Not the old one, dozing while the pride hunts closer in so he does not have to travel. A smaller one, in a smaller patch, three times over. I made myself the animal the place could not do without, and then I walked over the ridge.

Here is the part I have avoided writing for a long time. The old lion in that story takes fifteen years to become a problem, and the pride gets fifteen years of warning. I took ten months. The structure of the failure was identical, and I ran it at speed.

I came from a family that was surviving, and a technical college that people ranked below the universities. I wanted to prove I could do more than anyone in the room. Then I did prove it, and the reward was that the room stopped looking for anyone else.

I was twenty-one the first time.

Twelve portfolios

I was in my second year at university when I joined an audit firm, hired because a neighbour put my name forward. His name was also Tony. He held a position at that firm, and shortly after I arrived, he left it for an official appointment, the post he had wanted for years. I do not blame him for a second. You take the dream job.

So the firm replaced a professional a full generation older than me with a second-year student who happened to share his first name. I think a part of that firm believed this was what succession meant.

I was not qualified. I want to be plain about that. I was a student, taking a technical degree in finance while registering for a software engineering major at another university, and I disliked accounting work in a way that never made sense next to how good I was at it. Within weeks, I was carrying a portfolio. Before my probation ended, that portfolio was twelve companies, medium and large. I worked out the arithmetic years later, out of curiosity. Combined, those clients turned over more than thirty-two million dollars.

Read that again, and do not be impressed by it. I have told this story at dinner tables for twenty years and every time, somebody tells me I must have been remarkable. Perhaps. Here is the sentence it took me two decades to arrive at.

Nobody in that firm ever asked why a second-year student was holding twelve portfolios.

Not the owner, who was pleased. Not the managers, who were relieved. Not me, and I was the one being consumed by it, and I was enjoying it, which is what makes me the wrong kind of witness. An institution that asks that question hires a second person. An institution that does not ask has found a solution, and it will use the solution until the solution walks out.

I walked out. I did not finish my second year there. More companies kept arriving in my portfolio; I was drowning, and one day I decided I was finished, and no raise was going to move me. The owner drove to my house to speak to my mother. He asked her to convince me. She could not.

The firm had serious problems afterwards. I will not claim I caused them, because that is only vanity wearing guilt's coat. But I contributed, and it took the owner years to get his grip back on his own company.

He still remembers me. I still remember him. It was a good experience. All of those things are true, and none of them settles the account.

Oustaz Tony

The second time, I was a grown man and had no excuse at all.

I joined a community organization in West Beirut as a financial officer. It ran a school and a clinic for people the state does not count, in a part of the city most of Beirut drives around.

You turn off a main road, and within a minute you are somewhere else. Unpaved, dust rising behind the car, passages so narrow I folded in the mirrors to get through. At the end of it, a large gate. One of the children would open it and say, " Hello, Oustaz Tony.

I have worked with many organizations. The people in that one were the most decent human beings I have met in this sector, and I mean that without a single qualifier.

I was hired to do the finances. Within weeks, I was doing the finances, the operations, the gatekeeping, and whatever else in the building had no owner. One summer I supervised the construction of the school's second floor. The financial officer, on the scaffolding, through the holidays.

Nobody asked me to. That matters, and I am not going to let myself off with it. No one there loaded me up. I volunteered, every time, because there was nobody else and because being the one who does everything is a feeling I have chased my entire working life. I was already running other work at the time. I arrived stretched.

On my first day at the clinic, I drove a woman to a hospital in my own car. Her appendix had gone, or was about to, and nothing else was coming for her, and I was the financial officer. She lived. I have never decided whether that story is about her or about me.

Then something happened that I have never seen written down anywhere, and I now believe every institution does it.

When I tried to go back to doing only my actual job, my colleagues took it as a withdrawal. Not a correction. A withdrawal. The extra work had stopped being generosity somewhere along the way and had quietly become the baseline, and on the day I tried to return to the baseline in my contract, I was the one who had changed. I was letting them down.

That is what an institution does to a person who has made himself indispensable, and it is not malice. It is arithmetic. Once you are load-bearing, removing yourself is damage.

I left in under ten months. I left with urgency, and I left carrying the poverty of those children in a way I have not put down since. The chairman offered me more money. He offered me a different position. I told him my priorities were elsewhere, which was true and was not the whole truth.

Here is the one thing I did right, and it is the only reason I can publish this piece without shame.

Before I left, I trained three people, one after another. The role turned out to be difficult to hold, and the first two could not hold it. I stayed until the third one could. Then I went.

I do not know what happened to her, or to the role, or whether any of it survived. That is the honest end of it. You are not sent reports. You cross the ridge, and the pride goes on without you. The children who opened that gate are still in my head, rent-free, all these years later.

The same bill, at two speeds

Two scenes, eight years apart, the same structure at both ends.

Now set my exits beside the old lion's, because this is the whole point of the parable, and I want it stated flatly. The old male on the ridge takes fifteen years to become a liability, and his pride is given fifteen years of warning that it refuses to read. I took ten months. The failure was identical. I simply ran it at speed.

And notice what those cases have in common, because it is not the man. In each one, the institution had exactly one animal at the border, and in each one nobody was being trained to hold it next. Whether that animal ages out, is driven out, or leaves on a Tuesday because he is tired is a detail of the story. The bill is the same, and the same people pay it.

Before anyone comforts themselves that this is a Lebanese eccentricity, or a symptom of the crisis: in BoardSource's Leading With Intent survey, 29 per cent of nonprofits reported having a written succession plan. An earlier round of the same research found that half of nonprofit chief executives expected to leave within five years.

Read those two numbers together. Most of the sector knows the departure is coming and has written nothing down.

Sit with that, because it is not an oversight. Nobody forgets something for twenty years. It is a decision, made repeatedly, and never once out loud.

What more than one animal at the border looks like

So what would I tell an organization to do, given that I've been the problem three times?

Not a workshop. Four things, and they are boring, and the boredom is the point.

Somebody other than the leader can sign. Not in theory, not in an emergency, not once the lawyer has been consulted. This week.

The processes live somewhere other than one person's head. If the answer to how something works is a name, that is not a process. That is a hostage.

The board owns a succession policy with a date on it, and the date is not the retirement date. It is earlier. A successor who arrives on the last day is not a successor. He is an heir to a mess.

It appears someone is being deliberately trained to replace the person who wrote this article. If I am the only one who can do what I do, I have not made myself valuable. I have made my organization fragile and called it commitment.

I would rather be replaceable and honest than necessary and quietly corrosive. It has taken me until forty-five to write that sentence and mean it.

The lioness in that story is not a hero. She hunted closer to home so that an old animal would not have to travel. She watched her own sons pushed over the ridge on schedule and thought about the weather. When the bill came, she paid it, and she stayed, because staying is what her kind does.

Her failure was not cruelty. It was that for years, one animal at the border was easier than two.

Every institution I have worked in eventually found somebody who could carry it. And then, having found him, the room stopped looking.

That is the whole disease. Not the lion. The relief.

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Rot and Renewal is a weekly series on how institutions fail and how they come back. Next week: why aging organizations fail at technology, and why it was never about the tools.