The Privilege of Renewal

 

Rot and Renewal, week twelve, the last piece. People get one life. Institutions can get more than one, if somebody decides.

The white room

Four months after my cousin Johny was first admitted to hospital, we moved him to another one, to start radiotherapy on his brain.

The cancer was melanoma. It had started on his skin and spread to his lungs, where it left a tumour four centimetres wide, and from there through the rest of his body. For a while we had real hope. The immunotherapy he was receiving worked, we were told, for about seventy percent of patients. He was not one of them. Then it reached his brain.

That morning there were four of us in the room with him: his wife, my mother, my wife and me. We knew how bad it was. Johny did not, because we had not told him. He was in severe pain, and the nausea never stopped. He was a big man, and the cancer never shrank him the way I had watched it shrink others in our family. It was the most malicious illness any of us had seen.

He looked at me, and it was obvious to him that I was suffering as much as he was, in a different way. He told me not to worry. He told me he was fine. I was on the edge of tears. For two months I had been living the despair alongside his wife, both of us knowing the hope was going. Then the Red Cross team came to move him.

From that morning, he went down fast. A few days later, I do not remember how many, but not many, I got special permission to stay with him in the emergency room. He hated the ER. He felt abandoned there. He was no longer conscious. I spoke to him again and again, and he answered with broken words, and sometimes he swore at me, the way he always had, because around me that was what he still remembered how to do. He kept pulling the oxygen tube out of his nose. I kept putting it back, and got sworn at each time. That room, in its terrible white, was hell for both of us.

They say death is easy. It is the waiting for it that destroys you.

Two days later, Johny died in a palliative bed, with his wife and his mother beside him. And that was it. I have not recovered from it. But I am grateful that life brought the two of us together. He died the way most of us, the living, will.

Pen thoughts

Johny was forty-five, eleven months older than me, and the best man at my wedding. I loved him dearly. He had almost nothing to do with my working life, and until today I had never written about him here. But after that white room, I started going back over my own life the way you go back over a road you drove without paying attention.

Writing is how I do that. I have always written, in Arabic first, long before I learned to make English do what I wanted. Every couple of weeks I still sit down with a pen and a notebook and write about everything and nothing: things that might be useful to someone, and things I write only to clear my head. I have more of those notebooks than I can count. This blog is called Pen Thoughts, and it has been here since 2009.

In June this year I published a short piece here about an accounting scandal in Australia. An older friend, a man who has written for a living all his life, read it and called me. He told me I had something, and that I should grow it. I thought about it, and decided that the story I had to tell was my story with institutions.

My working life kept moving me through them: an audit firm, a factory floor, the payroll of a security company, a regional church network, a school and a clinic for children the state does not count, and the coordination tables where the money gets decided. Most people I grew up with chose a career and climbed it, or found somewhere safe and stayed. Later in life, I did some of that too. But I was lucky in what I was exposed to, and I wanted it on the page before time took that from me as well.

The privilege of renewal

When I started this series in July, I did not understand why that white room and these institutions sat so close together in my head. I think I do now.

People get one life. Institutions, so far, can get more than one.

The Church, across all its branches, is one of the oldest institutions on earth. In two thousand years it has been split, persecuted, reformed and declared dying more times than anyone can count, and it is still here.

A younger example. In June 1844, in London, a draper's assistant named George Williams gathered a few young men from the trade, to give them somewhere to go in a hard city other than the street. What they started became the Young Men's Christian Association. In the 182 years since, it has turned into things its founders could not have imagined. Basketball was invented at one of its training schools in 1891, and volleyball in one of its gyms four years later. It served soldiers through two world wars, built hostels, camps and schools, and today works with young people and refugees in well over a hundred countries. It did not last by staying what it was. It lasted by deciding, again and again, to become something else.

That is the privilege. A person cannot be born again into a new body. An institution can.

But a privilege is not a guarantee, and most institutions never use theirs. That is what the eleven pieces before this one were about, though I told them out of order. Told in order, the way a life is told, they look like this.

Born in a crisis

The first institution I ever lived in had no name. During the civil war, the basement of my grandparents' building became a shelter for forty or fifty people: my family, the neighbours, and strangers who arrived as refugees and within weeks were simply family. There was no committee, no chief and no written rules. Order was held by unspoken agreements, visible care and endless conversations. One night a shell killed a seventeen-year-old a few metres above us. The next evening, people went back down the stairs and carried on.

It worked, and it taught me something darker too. We normalised everything. Death became weather. I wrote about that basement in the first piece of this series, and promised to walk readers down its stairs every Wednesday. Most weeks it was a Wednesday. A few times it was a Thursday.

Institutions are often born like that: in a crisis, out of need, with nobody in charge and everybody responsible. The trouble starts later, when they succeed.

How it ages

From the 1970s until 2002, the Middle East Council of Churches lived through a golden age. Its departments ran so well that the organisation became a large machine that rolled by itself, almost independent of any single office. Then the era of strong general secretaries ended, and the church donors funding it grew uneasy about its costs. By the time everyone agreed it needed to turn, it no longer had the muscle to turn. The correction came anyway, in a single cut.

I called that piece The Organization on Cruise Control. Cruise control is not failure. It is a system built so well that it runs itself, until the road changes and nobody touches the wheel. The most dangerous organisations are not the ones that are failing. They are the ones still succeeding by yesterday's definition of success.

What makes it sick

The illness that follows is rarely dramatic. It is comfortable.

At twenty-one, in my second year at university, I joined an audit firm, and within weeks I was carrying twelve client portfolios. Nobody asked why a student was holding twelve portfolios: not the owner, who was pleased, not the managers, who were relieved, and not me, because I was enjoying it. Years later I did the same at a school and clinic in West Beirut, where I was hired for the finances and spent a summer on the scaffolding of its second floor. When I tried to go back to my actual job, my colleagues took it as a withdrawal. In The Room Stopped Looking, I told it through a parable of a pride of lions that relies on one ageing male at its border. An institution that finds one person able to carry it stops looking for a second. That relief is the disease.

At twenty-four, I spent three months building the payroll of a large security company. The officer who opened the elevator for me every morning earned half as much again as I did. The door said I outranked him; the payroll told the truth. In A Toxic Culture Is Not a Broken One, I argued that the company was not broken at all. Its fear, bitterness and caution were all being paid for, in money, in status, or in the right to stay. An institution is not judged by what it meant. It is judged by what it pays for.

A whole sector can fall sick together. In one year, organisations in this country reported training around one hundred and forty-seven thousand young people, documented and verified, and nobody can tell you what it did to the economy. After the Beirut explosion I wrote a grant for a programme that did not need the money, because the money was there and I could not find the sentence that says no. On that same grant, we later returned money for medicine people had already taken, because one invoice was dated three days outside the contract. In Accountable in One Direction, I described an apparatus sensitive enough to catch a date and blind to whether the money should have been given at all. Every instrument we built points upward, toward the donor. None points down, toward the people the money was for.

The treatments that fail

When an institution finally notices it is sick, it usually reaches for the wrong medicine.

In my audit firm years, I helped install a stock and sales system at the largest tissue and paper producer in the country, and built a cost analysis of its products. On one of my first visits there were diapers cut open on a desk, rival brands laid out layer by layer, and the first question from the owners' side of the table was whether the new system meant fewer people. The system worked. The cost study was correct, confirmed by the one family member able to confirm it. Nothing happened, and within a few years the products were gone from the shelves. In Digital Was Never the Problem, I put it in one line: automation produces information. It cannot produce the willingness to act on it.

At twenty-five, I joined the finance department of a regional church network. Within a month of reading its ledgers, I could see that running the institution cost more than project funding could ever carry. The church donors could see it too, and they were clear about what would bring them back: reform first, which in practice meant fewer people on a payroll of around sixty. The decision was never taken. Then the money ran out, and the cuts came anyway, with no plan and no soft landing. In Reform Promises Nothing, I called it the only real choice an institution has. Decide, or be decided.

In October 2019 I drove into Beirut's uprising, and within weeks I had concluded that a country can produce enormous anger and solidarity and still have no way to steer them. Three months later, after a workshop in Byblos, I published the opposite theory about organisations: that an organisation is more like a plant than a factory, and will grow by itself if it is given care. In The Plant Theory, I audited my own post. A plant has no interests. An institution is nothing but interests, and interests move only when not moving becomes expensive. Momentum is not renewal. Neither is kindness.

The patient that never dies

A country is an institution too, and Lebanon is the one I know best. It does not die. It does not heal either.

At 6:06 in the evening on 4 August 2020, the port exploded and threw me two metres through the air into my own desk. Officials admitted afterwards that they had been warned, weeks in advance, about what was stored in that warehouse. When I wrote about it this August, six years on, nobody had been tried. In Where Were the Gatekeepers?, I traced the habit back to 1991, when a parliament forgave every crime of fifteen years of war, and to the seventeen thousand people who disappeared in it. At a workshop on the memory of the war, Wadad Halwani, who has spent forty years asking what happened to them, looked at a gathering of strangers and asked: "Now you know our stories. What are you going to do?" I had no answer.

At twenty-one, on my first real file at the audit firm, I took a client's papers to the Ministry of Finance office in Baabda. The man behind the grey aluminium desk read them, told me some papers were missing, and added that when I brought them, he would give me another list. I called the owner of the firm and told him the man was asking for money. He laughed. In How a Country Buys Silence, I set that afternoon beside a teacher I met in 2023, thrown out of her public school after twenty-one years for reporting that the director's daughter was paid to teach and never came. The system buys silence three ways: it laughs at the newcomer, it punishes the one who refuses, and it makes everyone else a participant.

How it comes back

Two of the eleven pieces show an institution actually coming back, and they have more in common than I noticed at the time.

The first was a room called Light. Years after the church network, in a different organisation, a donor offered to fund a certification process end to end, outside the operating budget. I nearly let it lapse under the load on my desk. A colleague would not let me. She built a team of five youth workers in their twenties, who gave up their weekends for months in a training room they had painted themselves, a yellow sun on the ceiling, to write down what the organisation was for. It reached Silver certification two years later. In Reform Promises Nothing, I named what made it survive: somebody else paid, somebody else set the deadline, and the people who carried it had nothing to defend.

The second was the development arm of the church network, dismantled and nearly forgotten by 2009. A Swedish church donor gave us fifteen thousand dollars to write a new strategy. Nobody in the building had been paid for months, me included, and none of it went on salaries. The arm was given autonomy from its parent's problems, delivered two small grants, and then a large psychosocial programme across the south and the Bekaa. In Survival Is Not Renewal, I set it beside a family business in the mountains that died completely while two of its own people rebuilt its trade in a warehouse in Achrafieh. When I left the church network, I was certain it would not survive. I looked this year. It is still standing, its humanitarian work carried under a new name, and in 2023 it spent more than five million dollars on programmes across three countries.

In both, somebody decided, and somebody paid. An institution that survives has been acted upon. An institution that renews has decided something.

Nobody decided

Laid out like a life, the eleven pieces tell one story. In every one of them, the information was already there. The officials had been warned about the port. The cost study at the factory was correct. The church network's arithmetic was no secret to anyone who could read a balance sheet. What was missing was never knowledge. It was a decision.

Rot needs nobody. It is what happens by default, while everyone waits for someone else, for a better moment, or for the arithmetic. Renewal needs someone. Someone has to decide, put a date on it and pay the price, and the price always arrives before the result.

I promised in the first piece not to sell you despair. Reading the series back, I sold you more rot than renewal: two comebacks in eleven pieces. That is close to the ratio twenty years of this work have shown me.

Somewhere in these weeks, one more thing settled. Institutions are made for people, not the other way round. An institution that treats its own survival as its legacy has forgotten what it is for. People are the reason an institution exists. Decisions are the only way it changes.

This series has handed you more than thirty questions and tests. I will leave you with one, to ask of any institution you care about, and of yourself. What did we decide this year, on what date, and what did it cost us?

The years he was not given

Institutions get second chances. Johny did not.

One of the first things I ever posted here, in December 2009, was a short poem called Like the Flowing River. It asked the reader to be like a river: quiet in the dark, reflecting whatever the sky sends. A month ago, in this series, I described my early twenties as "a current I was in rather than a series of decisions I was making." For a long time I trusted that river. After the white room, I cannot afford it anymore.

So here is the last thing this series taught me. I wrote it for people who run institutions, and somewhere along the way I noticed that I was its first reader. Every lesson in it applies to the place where I spend my days, and most of them I have not yet applied myself. Rot needs nobody, in an institution or in a life. Renewal needs someone to decide.

Back up the stairs

This is the last piece of Rot and Renewal. I will keep writing, because I always have, but this series has said what it came to say. There are stories I did not tell. Some of them are not mine to tell.

I still owe Wadad Halwani an answer. When I wrote about her in August, I only knew what I refused to do: file it under "that's just how it is here" and change the channel.

Twelve pieces later, here is the rest of my answer. I am going to keep writing it down, so that none of it becomes weather. And I am going to decide, while there is still time to decide.

The shelter was never a place to stay. It was where we waited until we could climb back up. It is still not safe up there. We go up anyway.

My cousin did not get a forty-sixth birthday. My life is still moving, and I intend to live the years he was not given as the best version of myself.