Shit Happens!!

It’s quintessential for any organization to underline itself as a system that works. Be it a school, army, workplace, family or society, there success depends on selling a belief that learning, defense, productivity, values or life is a cosmos. There are well defined process, rules and practices which when followed diligently yields a perfect and desired result.

Like hell, it works!!

The success of a system is in not working continually. It’s in creating an impression that it works continually and any failure is due to lack of compliance by the participant. Once it’s established as a fact that when a student fails, its lack of hard work and dedication of the student and not because of ambiguity on the part of educational system, the myth becomes self propagating. A failed student is considered an anomaly and its made an example to prevent many more going that way, even though majority are gravitated towards the scary “F”. The day most people fail, schools will have to reinvent themselves.

Of course, questioning all the elements of a system will breed anarchy.

But reiterating the system, without adulterating it with doubts fortify falsehood that hard work is rewarded, sincerity is met with its likeness, practice makes one perfect, love exists, training doesn’t fail, happy endings and yada yada yada ... without explicitly stating that things do go wrong, failure cannot always be analyzed, success cannot always be guaranteed, you don’t have to be successful to say that failure is ok, pressure don’t always turn carbon to diamond ...

I was a mess this week after orchestrating a debacle of a demo to client. And in my despondency, I truly identified with the people behind this picture. And wondered what will the world look like if there is more tolerance to failure and everyone can say aloud what everyone knows .... that "shit happens!!"