Talking or Acting? How Do We Spend Most of our Time?

by Dr Raymond Perrier · October 9, 2016

We need to get our own house in order. Do we as Church people — dioceses, parishes, sodalities, religious communities, NGOs — spend most of our time talking or acting? Do we hold ourselves and others accountable? Are we aware of the opportunities that we miss?

Many years ago, I was observing at close quarters a potential merger between two huge telecoms companies, one American, the other British. The difference in corporate culture was very evident.

An American negotiator was teasing his counterpart one day that the Brits spent so much time making plans, they never actually delivered them. “Your problem,” he said in his Yankee drawl, “is that it’s always ‘Ready, aim, aim, aim…’—but you never actually fire!” The Brit retorted: “Well, it’s better than your strategy: ‘Fire, ready, aim!’”

Needless to say, the merger never happened. Almost 20 years on, the US company has imploded in a web of corporate mismanagement. The British company has survived — but it has never achieved its full potential and just limps along.

I was reminded of this recently when involved in various planning exercises. There is definitely a part of South African culture that is like the American example above, the “gung ho” approach. This is hardly surprising when you recall that so much of the country was built on mining. You don’t become a millionaire by arriving second at the seam of gold. So an approach that is based on action is more likely to succeed — and you just accept that there will also be some failures on the way.

But an awful lot of South Africa — some companies, most of the NGOs and Church world, and all of government — seems to be stuck at “Ready, aim, aim, aim”, and they never get round to pulling the trigger.

I lost two days of my life recently as one of the few outside guests invited to attend the planning meeting of a fairly substantial department of the eThekwini (Durban) municipality. They were setting themselves performance targets and — I kid you not — one of the targets was that they would “commit to explore the possibility of X”.

So a department that has consistently failed to do what it was created for will hold itself accountable based on whether or not it “explored the possibility” of something. How could they possibly fail to meet such a vague target?

“Talking” is held in such high regard in public life. It starts with the multiple talk shops of parliament, legislature and assembly; continues down to community meetings and in organisations; and finds it low-water mark on talk radio.

In each case the key mark of success is whether or not something was talked about extensively — not whether a useful conclusion was reached. Was an actionable plan put together?

Were changes made that would actually benefit those in need? No, apparently it’s enough that “all views were heard”.

This, of course, is part of an even greater deceit: “All views are equally important”. Are they really? If I suspect that I have a brain tumour, I am going to seek out the views of a highly trained expert. I won’t spend any time canvassing the opinions of my accountant, my brother-in-law, or the man phoning in from Benoni.

After centuries in which only a few voices counted in South Africa — and those predominately were white, male, heterosexual and Protestant — you can see why hearing a wider range of voices is important. But discussion should be a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Instead we get trapped in a two-stage process of putting off action for as long as possible. We talk and talk and talk, and finally set some sort of vaguely worded goal. And then we formulate a plan, or sometimes several plans, each one more elaborate than the last, and make sure that there is plenty of opportunity to canvas opinion on the plan, have stakeholder meetings and probably produce further drafts of the plan. Anything to avoid actually doing something concrete in the real world.

I think that it is the fear of accountability that results in the “analysis paralysis”. If I do something it might not work and I will be held responsible for the failure. But if I discuss things and plan them, then I can always point to this as “activity”. And it is hard to prove that any discussion or plan has failed if it is not actually implemented.

It is easy to mock government officials for falling into this trap. They do so because we let them get away with it; or, until recently, we struggled to imagine an alternative.

However, some of the new mayors that have recently taken office have decided that they do need to start acting if they are going to change anything. Five-year terms pass quickly.

Getting our own house in order

“Love,” St Ignatius of Loyola reminds us, “is seen more in deeds than in words” — and he was the founder of the Jesuits, an order that is generally not shy of words!

Some reach for the excuse that the Church operates sub specie aeternitatis (from the perspective of eternity). And it is true that the Kingdom may not come in our lifetime. But thankfully there were many who went before us and built churches and schools and clinics without setting eternity as their target date. They responded directly to the needs in front of them.

Pope Francis, it seems, is a man who also has a clear target date. He knows he will not be pope forever, so he has a mission to build some part of the Kingdom within his own lifetime.

That, of course, is a mission that each one of us has. Not to talk about the works of mercy; not even just to plan works of mercy; but to deliver works of mercy in our place, in our generation, using whatever resources the Lord has chosen to give us until he holds us each accountable: “for what we have done and for what we have failed to do…”