The Sparrow Moment!

Sri Lanka our southern neighbour and Isle of serendipity is in trouble. After many years of ethnic strife, it witnessed peace for a while but is now coming to grips with its own Sparrow moment. Sri Lanka is witnessing an economic meltdown.?

Can the tiny sparrow bring a nation to its knees? Well, every time a sparrow or two lands on my balcony I rejoice. It is a signal that nature is fine and in good shape.?

In the recent past, the President of Sri Lanka in a moment of effulgence decided to ban all pesticides and crop chemicals by the order of a decree, thus pushing the food market to recalibrate produce, which obviously fell, pushing inflation up. Interest rates followed making it an economist’s delight. Even as the Lankan rupee weakens against the dollar, imports get costlier, fuelling inflation further.?

Why did this happen? Organisation Theorists will tell you that Group Think is a dangerous phenomenon when a small clique of people takes decisions without contemplating possible outcomes. It is called as scenario planning. A similar moment would have occurred for a great organization like Kodak, a market leader who conceptualized the digital camera and in a moment of casualness decided that it had no future. Kodak filed for bankruptcy not long after. President Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka seems to have gotten himself and his nation into a spot of bother with a rather hare-brained scheme. Even in a large and agriculturally driven country like India cultivation of organic crops is more of a fad.?

So, what’s the humble sparrow got to do with all of this brouhaha in SL. Well, it turns out that in a moment of similar effulgence Mao in China issued two decrees, the first being that all families should produce steel and the second lesser-known decree that all sparrows were to be slaughtered. The logic being that sparrows eat grain. This moments of incandescence left China with a staggering environmental disaster and an unprecedented famine. It is estimated that between 40 to 50 million Chinese died due to starvation.??China had had a sparrow moment. Analysts say roughly 600 million sparrows may have been killed by overzealous people who went about their orders with a single-minded purpose. Certainly, a moment to pause and reflect on the single mindedness!

Sri Lanka is spiralling down towards its own food crisis and will eventually pay the price for not questioning a President who seems to stumble from one crisis to another. As for India, you will soon see the navy ferrying food to Sri Lanka. If you are a tourist this might be a great moment to visit the country with the SL rupee collapsing, that is if you don’t mind sparse food on your table, organic or otherwise.

All organizations’ encounter sparrow moments. The strategy should be to avoid group-think, particularly when there is a strong hierarchical overtone to management, have a reasonable debate with competent people in tow while making decisions and chart out possible outcomes and monitor these outcomes very closely. Most importantly admitting failure is not a sin.