Sermon “When Systems Fail Us”

The Rev. Rali Weaver

If I were to have us acknowledge just one thing this morning it would be that much of our present life is balanced on intricate interconnected systems that could malfunction at any time.

When I help to plan weddings I like to encourage couples to make the ceremonies as simple as possible because of this one universal truth: The more moving parts the more likely it will get broken.

This is as true for the ceremony as it is for the relationship. The more moving parts the more likely it is to get broken. Introduce a third party into a relationship, be it a pet or a child or another love interest or even baggage from the past and the system becomes more complicated. The third body creates tension; and this doesn’t always but can cause things to break.

This is true for everything. I was on the phone with my cable, phone and intranet company more than 15 times in the past month. You would think combining three services with one company would make the set up of services much easier. But for some reason while the cable could be connected, and the phone could be connected the intranet took over a month to be connected. The complicated system I had to navigate in order to talk to any real live representative and then the massive number of transfers to another person who might know more about the situation left me feeling as though I should forget the whole business. Complicated systems can throw things out of whack.

When you really think about it almost everything we rely upon in our culture today be it trash removal or groceries, healthcare or banking, security or communication, medicine or even entertainment— Everything we rely upon is based upon some system of some sort. Without all the moving parts working together simultaneously things will fall apart.

For example we rely upon our grocery stores to put milk on our table. If all the grocery stores closed we would have trouble getting milk on our table. If all the cows in our state had a disease and could no longer produce milk we would have trouble getting milk on our table. If nobody wanted to raise cows for a living we would have trouble getting milk on our table. If the truckers went on strike we would have trouble getting milk on our table.

These seem to be simple straight lines. The milk is produced by the cow the farmer harvests the milk, the truck delivers the milk, we buy the milk. But there are other elements in the equation as well. There must be a decent rainfall for the ground to produce enough grain and grass for cows to live healthy lives and produce milk. Fuel to heat barns and drive trucks must be available and at a reasonable cost for the milk prices to remain the same. And to put milk on our tables we need a job that creates an income. All of these mechanisms working together are required.

There are countless unseen systems at work here too. How much gas is used effects pollution. Pollution affects the rainfall. The length of time it takes to transport the milk affects its freshness. Recent research suggests that pasteurization is not a response to contamination within the milk itself but contamination caused by the industrialized dairy industry. With Large scale and large herd farming and long distances between the milk and the table came the inability to preserve fresh milk on store shelves and this made pasteurization necessary.

Moving around much as the children did this morning in an intricate pattern everything from the electricity in our homes to refrigerate the milk to the money we rely upon to buy the milk, requires many hands, many different systems to get milk on our tables.

All things work this way. Even the systems that get me in the pulpit on Sunday morning from a working alarm clock to working heat and plumbing to coordinated efforts of the Parish Committee and Worship committee. Everything has a part.

And in families too we have roles and responsibilities and at any time an individual in the group is not themselves the entire family system can be disrupted. Just think of when your child or spouse or parent or even your pet gets sick or is injured how this changes the dynamic in immeasurable ways.

I bring all this up to you because like Edwin Friedman I believe we are living in a time of great turmoil. Old ways of doing things no longer work perfectly, new ways have not yet been developed and there are times we are caught in the crossfire of interconnecting misfiring systems. Voicemail and phone systems are a perfect example but the evidence also lies in our newspapers, which are full of bank scandals and bailouts and the never-ending battles over attempted health care solutions.

Even our rescue attempts in the midst of the crisis in Haiti and Chile seem disorganized at best and we are left wondering, couldn’t things be handled better and couldn’t the answers be simpler?

In his book Friedman uses his understanding of emotional regression to describe the nature of emotional regression within our society today.

The five characteristics he points to are:

1. Reactivity: the vicious cycle of intense reactions of each member to events and to one another.

2. Herding: a process through which the forces of togetherness triumph over the forces of individuality and move everyone to adapt to the least mature members.

3. Blame Displacement: an emotional state in which family members focus on forces that have victimized them rather than taking responsibility for their own being and destiny.

4. A quick fix mentality: A low threshold for pain that constantly seeks systems of relief rather than fundamental change.

5. Lack of well-differentiated leadership: a failure of nerve that both stems from and contributes to the first four.

(Page 53-54)

It is easy to see the characteristics of Emotional regression at play in the rhetoric between political parties and in the banter that takes place in our legislature from the school board to our Congress.

Friedman points out that:

“The ultimate irony of social regression… is that it eventually co-opts the very institutions that train and support the leaders who can pull a society out of its devolution. It does this by concentrating their focus on data and technique rather than the emotional process of the leader’s own self.” p55.

Following Friedman’s points our devolution, as a society appears obvious. So how do we go about pulling ourselves up?

I juxtaposed our reading from Friedman this morning with an 1846 sermon by the man to my left the Rev. Alvan Lamson.

I did this for several reasons.

First I chose this reading because he starts right out by recognizing that no system, no human institution is perfect. There will be mistakes, errors and misfiring systems.

The more we can tolerate the changes and the losses the easier the frustrations will be to bear.

It seems obvious that this is why at the turn of the new millennium people prepared for a crash of all infrastructures. There was a deep urge within the world psyche to prepare for the crash of our systems. Remember the preparations people made for Y2K? Families and individuals collected everything from canned food to gas masks and blankets and water and matches, everything they felt they would need to survive if all systems stopped at 01/01/00. Looking back at these reactions ten years later the preparations for Y2K might seem silly but the instinct makes sense.

The world is in a time of great transformation. How we prepare is important.

The second reason I chose this reading is because Alvan Lamson describes working systems in his own time that he was both proud of and confident about. Primarily Lamson spoke of the Congregational System, which was fairly new in his day. Congregationalism at its best offers a grass roots consciousness that can liberate systems from stuck patterns.

In his sermon Lamson holds up a similar truth to Friedman. In order to navigate a failing system Lamson asserts that we must refuse to allow past judgment to be our binding law or any present judgment or practice create a binding law for the future.

Friedman writes that one of the attributes of an “imaginatively gridlocked …system is the continual search for new answers to old questions rather than any effort to reframe the questions themselves.” pg 37.

In order to create the new systems we must form new more liberating questions. And it is our new questions that will offer freedom for our future.

In Haiti, as in all reconstruction efforts the question is “How do we return things to the way things were?” But imagine if instead the question was “How does Porte Prince get reinvented so that it will improve the quality of life for every Haitian citizen?”

Our current administration seems to be asking over and over and over “How do we reform the healthcare system so it can serve every person who needs it?” Mired in the needs of both the medical community and the individuals who need services how might their progress shift if instead of reforming the already broken system they were focused on the one simple question “How do we create a healthcare system that meets the needs of the uninsured?”

Acknowledging that old systems are broken and turning an eye to something new is difficult. Generally people have a hard time seeing beyond the past ways of thinking and doing things and this limits potential progress.

When talking of this to Sharon Lane she pointed me to a book that suggests a solution. In his book The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Atul Gawande discusses the importance of using preplanning and organizational checklists in both medicine and the larger world. Through the introduction of two-minute checklists in the operating room that include elements from being sure there is enough blood and antibiotic on hand to having each person on the operating team introduce themselves before the operation, teamwork was markedly improved and operational errors were reduced by thirty percent.

It occurs to me that if the Medical field, which is full of innovation and change can benefit from a structure and framework as simple as a checklist to improve quality of service without limiting future freedom so can we.

Creating systems that encourage interpersonal communication and leave room for innovation is key in creating quality systems that can move and change over time.

Our current systems may fail us.

Asking the right question and making checklists might not solve all of our problems if our electrical system fails us but it might help to keep in mind what is important.

As we continue to navigate our lives amidst a failing economic system, and in a devolving world system, my hope is that we can ground ourselves in our community. Remember the importance of the traditions and the structures we have. We must hold our structures lightly and to leave room for improvement and innovation and to rely on each other to help us through.