I first heard about the Egyptian pig cull back in October when the story broke in the New York Times. Needless to say, it piqued my interest because as is often the case, seemingly irrelevant stories can provide insights that the less trained eye will simply pass by.
When Egyptian government officials reacted to the growing concerns about the possible spread of Swine Flu beyond the Mexican borders it was more motivated by concerns that it would be singled out as the backward administration unable to deal with matters of national interest as opposed to the bigger picture of its citizens wellbeing.
The received wisdom stated that Swine Flu was, in part, caused by the existence of pigs therefore the mass culling of pigs would preempt a contagion of scale seen in South America.
What happened next could only be described as the stupidity of the organization taking hold in dealing with an organizational problem – what’s measured gets done.
Within weeks of the mass cull the streets of Cairo were strewn with garbage, festering waste and a stench that made Egyptian hydroponic sewage farms smell like Elizabeth Arden. Rats, pigeons and vermin were beginning to think it was their Eid, Birthday and New Years celebration all in one.
Egyptian hospitals reported freak outbreaks in typhoid like symptoms combined with other sporadic incidences of diseases more associated with 14th Century bubonic conditions than a developing economy in the 21st.
So bad was the situation that municipal workers went on strike because the garbage mountain was, as they saw, simply unassailable. Garbage chaos had reached crisis point; strikes, gridlock and a general breakdown of services. Four months into the strikes schools were refusing to open because the logisitcal situation had deteriorated so severely that locals could neither reach it nor service it.
The government’s plan to innoculate school children on the commencement of their new year – the crunch point for most disease transmission – was scuppered.
Why did the solution actually make the problem a lot worse?
If you want to know what went wrong look no further than the Zabaleen – an ancient caste of Christians who for centuries had been tasked with the duty of collecting garbage from Egyptian households. Rather than the custom as expected in our countries of “putting the garbage out”, Zabaleen collected it from your home. Why? Because they fed all that good organic waste to their pigs.
We often compound our organizational problems by opting for short term solutions to long term problems largely unaware of the context in which interactions occur.
The above parable can be applied to numerous aspects of our lives. I’m considering here in the context of marketing; our own metrics compel us to blindly interrupt and annoy our customers because they’re avoiding us.
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