Some years ago I attended a speech contest. It was an impromptu speech contest. At such events, the contestants are given the topic of the day on the spot. They have five seconds to think about the subject before the clock starts to run. They have two and a half minutes to expound on their ideas.
The topic was ‘Even a Great Wall has to start with a single brick’. That being a contest, each competitor tried his best to come out with something original and attention-grabbing. One contestant went absolutely overboard. He started with something about building walls with bananas. Bananas? Really? We were intrigued and were waiting for his speech. I think the sight of hundreds of people staring at him expectantly freaked him out. He blew a mental fuse, went blank and froze on stage. Poor man, he walked off the stage with his face matching the colour of the timing light, namely, red.
Today I am sitting in the comfort of my study and have the luxury of time to ponder on “building walls with bananas” I can venture to say something about this intriguing idea.
First off, I must affirm that bricks are great things. They are made to precise dimensions; they can be laid to perfect formation to realise the designer’s dream. Magnificent structures, ancient and modern, the world over, bear testimony to their usefulness. Even in children’s stories, we sing praise to those fire-hardened clay blocks.
In the story of the ‘Three Little Pigs’ and their escapades with the big bad ugly wolf, it was bricks that saved their bacon. The first pig built his house with straw; the second with wood and both houses were blown down with a huff and a puff from the wolf. The third brother pig built a house of bricks and no matter how the wolf huffed and puffed, the house stood firm.
We even have an idiom ‘you’re a brick’ to express our gratitude and respect for a highly reliable person whom we appreciate. Apparently, the expression originated in ancient Greece when the city of Sparta was one of the most formidable military powers of its day. The king, Lycurgus, boasted that his city could not be conquered because of its invincible walls. When the visiting king saw the city of Sparta, to his great surprise there were no walls at all.
“Where are the invincible walls you’ve been boasting about?” asked the visitor.
“These are the walls of Sparta, every man a brick,” replied the king, pointing to his soldiers.
That statement by the King of Sparta is a paradox. The king was proud that his soldiers were drilled to be a perfect fighting machine. However, the very act of reducing them to mere automatons had diminished these men. Human beings are more than just bricks.
Let me backtrack a bit – to the shortcomings of likening achieving success with a team of humans to building a wall with bricks. As I said, bricks are a wonderful invention. They are precise and exact. They give builders the assurance of reliability. Those that do not fit to the plan can be cut to size, and those that have flaws can be discarded with impunity. Thus great structures can be built with these little blocks. But humans, now that’s a different kettle of fish (pardon the expression). Though many are reliable, reliability and conformity are not the assured traits of man. Man is full of foibles and he carries with him emotional baggage of bias and prejudices that many a time colours his perception and clouds his judgment. More importantly, there resides in all of us a monster that is not easy to tame. I am talking about the human ego. Yes, we are not as predictable as bricks. And unlike bricks, we come in all shapes and sizes – physically, psychologically and intellectually. Now, try building a wall with this bunch of bananas. To the uninitiated bananas are pretty similar in shape and size. Those of us from banana producing countries know better. They come in all shapes and sizes – from the petite and sweet ‘finger banana’ (in Hokkien we call it ‘rice banana’) to the huge plantain (‘pisang tanduk’ horn banana).
That is the challenge that faces us in all our enterprises. We have to work with humans – emotional, temperamental and unpredictable beings. Some people despair at the thought and come up with sayings like, ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’. An even more telling expression of the lack of faith in working with a team is “a camel is a horse designed by a committee”. I am not partial to this statement. Firstly, it is an insult to camels. It is implying that a camel is an ugly and inferior creature and that it’s distinguishing features, such as its hump, long spiny legs and ungainly gait, are taken to be the deformities that resulted from its poor design. Secondly, it is such a defeatist attitude towards group decision-making.
In my book, it is the very dynamism, this unpredictability and the uniqueness of each one of us that make our group enterprises so exciting. If we can accept the fact that humans have different traits, if we can try to understand those traits and work to harness them we can build our great wall of success. It is like using the spectrum of all the colours of a rainbow to produce a single white light.
Many years ago I watched on TV a beautiful football match. It was the European Champions League final between Barcelona and Manchester United. It was a dazzling display by the La Liga Champion, reducing the English Champion, Manchester United, to play the role of lumbering, and sometimes, frenzied giants, and of course to no avail. The newspapers were full of praise of the little genius of a footballer, Lionel Messi. Really, Messi, for all his skills, would not have been able to deliver the Champions Cup to Barcelona. The team had a solid defensive wall, anchored by an outstanding goalkeeper, a creative midfield that can slot a defence-piercing pass given half a chance. The goal poachers were offered oodles of chances. It was a triumph of teamwork made up of (figuratively speaking) bananas of different shapes and sizes.
So, next time someone says to you and your friends, ‘you are just a bunch of bananas,’ take it as a compliment.