Ubuntu

Above: Boulders Beach, Cape Town, South Africa. Photo by Jack Young on Unsplash.

This past weekend a small group of colleagues and I ate dinner at a nice restaurant downtown. The restaurant was popping: wait lines spilled out onto the patio where folks huddled under heat lamps, servers rushed between narrow halls with glasses stacked high or small plates in hand, and conversations competed with each other in the busy dining rooms. If you were to ask me if the food was enjoyable, I'd quickly tell you yes and recommend several wonderful dishes. But if you were to ask me how my dinner was, I'd hesitate to call it a positive one. While my meal tasted fabulous, one of my colleagues had a negative dining experience: her order was forgotten and thus delayed, one part of her order was wrong, and one of the dishes ended up ruining her entire meal/appetite. For me, if I'm with a group and one person isn't having a good time, I find it can put a damper on the collective experience. I don't think I'm wrong in saying that most of us want others to enjoy life, food, and laughter. 

Above: Athens, Greece. Photo by Perry Grone on Unsplash.

I've worked with teams who don't like to collaborate across invisible boundaries, with individuals who don't want to do tasks that they don't deem "their job," and when you work with people who aren't willing to be flexible, curious, and generally helpful, the entire team suffers. I love groups of stakeholders where everyone is aligned around a common goal, unified by a vision, and cooperating to move the whole group forward. When one person is focused on individual success, there can never be as much momentum or innovation as an entire team working together to achieve something greater and with a mindset where everyone wins.

Above: Boulders Beach, Cape Town, South Africa. Photo by Quaid Lagan on Unsplash.

Earlier today, I listened to my daily meditation in my beloved Calm app. Since I was in the kitchen for a while doing meal prep for the week ahead, I decided to listen to today's sleep story -- not because I was trying to fall asleep while chopping sweet potatoes, but because I had worked through yesterday evening and wanted as relaxing a sabbath as possible before returning to the office tomorrow. South African actress Lesley-Ann Brandt (she plays "Maze" on the show Lucifer) narrates a beautiful tale of a woman in the lush, vivid landscape of Cape Town meeting family and learning about Ubuntu. Ubuntu is an African philosophy that is sometimes translated to mean "I am because we are" or "humanity towards others" (not just other people, but also other creatures and to the planet); its focus is harmony that connects everything. As the story unfolds, there are numerous examples of how this plays out in the world around us every day and how we can see and embody that harmony in our own lives. Written by Christina Yang, the story paints a portrait of the gorgeous and unique plants, animals, sky, sea, clouds, and people in the Western Cape. 

Ubuntu could not have come at a more appropriate time. Over the weekend I have been pondering about how when one person suffers, we all can suffer, or how one attitude can ruin an entire event or project (or baby shower, in the case of a funny/horrifying story from a friend). Ubuntu helped me flip the switch: instead of thinking about negativity, I'm now thinking about positivity. I'm thinking about how I can work to create more harmony around me. Yes, yes, I know it's cliché to say this, but there's truth behind it: we can't change everyone and we can't change their actions but we can change how we react. My team on-site received a few compliments about our positivity, our desire to help each other, and our rapid response to solving problems. I want to take that forward into every team I'm on and every project I touch, and remember that showing others humanity, empathy, and kindness can go a long way in changing not only their narrative but my own as well. 

Cheers.

Above: Boulders Beach, Cape Town, South Africa. Photo by Kym Ellis on Unsplash.