This may appear trivial, but it is important to delve on the deeper meaning of the experience.
Let me take you around my garden to show you a simple problem that I had of connecting the hose to the tap. The hose reel had only one end to which I thought I can connect the sprayer. However, the other end was part of the reel with an opening by the side. I thought this is the end that should be connected to the tap, but the hose pipe was missing.
I called out to my son to get me the connector pipe. He came back with a short hose with several connectors at both ends. However, this hose was in no shape or ready to be connected to either the tap or the hose reel. After several attempts I failed to figure out whether the tap had the issue or the hose had the issue or the connectors had the issue.
With my patience running out, I took out all the connectors from both ends of the pipe and also the connector from the tap. Inspecting the tap, hose reel and the hose pipe, I figured out that none of those connectors were necessary and I was happy to get on with my task of watering the garden.
This experience should alert us on the convoluted learning that we are all going through. The basic delivery of education (in this case the pipe without the connectors) can still help us to not only survive in this world but also to understand it. However, when we get born as a simple pipe, we get connected with so many connectors that have no meaning to make the simplest of connections possible when required. When that happens we need to understand that these connectors are to be disconnected from the basic pipe that we were born with to make newer connections to open up the newer world. That’s the fundamental transformation that is required at an individual level. We can talk about business transformation on the same lines, but the connectors that we need to get rid of to find new ones will need a different level of understanding of the business landscape. I will talk about this in my next blog.
How many of us realize that this transformation is needed rather than incremental accumulation of the similar things at different point in times? Do we realize it all? Is removing, the connectors that are attached to us in so many ways, difficult to make new connections?
As this experience shows us, we have to make the effort to remove these connectors to rediscover the real us and to make newer connections possible. That’s how I believe the world around us will never become too old for us or too difficult to understand or too complex to deal with. The help that you get from COL is unfathomable in this respect. It not only eases the task of removing those connectors with ease and to equip ourselves with newer ones, but also makes us enjoy the efforts of doing so.