Interview with Alpha Bah, Country Director of the World Food Programme’s Pacific Multi-Country Office.
Here is an interesting train of thought:
a) True creativity comes when you disconnect from your ego. So the creative process benefits if we are able to disconnect from our ego.
b) A very effective way to get rid of the ego is to develop empathy, as the ability to understand and share the feelings of others helps us gain other perspectives outside of our own world.
c) One way to develop empathy is to adopt a humanitarian mindset to your work and its purpose.
d) So instead of approaching life with just a “What’s in it for me?”, we should adopt a mindset of “What’s in it for humanity?”
By doing that, you might actually end up having better ideas – ideas that will not just benefit others, but also yourself.
This insight came through a conversation with Alpha Bah. Mr. Bah is currently the Country Director of the World Food Programme’s Pacific Multi-Country Office, based in Fiji. Originally from Sierra Leone, he has served within the UN system for over 30 years, working in different regions in the world. He has worked in North Korea, in Bangladesh, during the Rohingya refugee crisis, in West Africa during the Ebola outbreak and in Sri Lanka after the tsunami. Before moving into leadership positions, his background is in establishing robust communication quickly in areas affected by a catastrophe.
During my conversation with him, it became clear that someone like Alpha, who has been working for 30 years to help the most vulnerable on the planet, has a different approach to work.
He said: “None of the problems we’re solving are our problems, anyway, it’s humanity’s problems. But somebody has to step up and say, Hey, what can we do to make it easier for people?”
That is why the World Food Program exists.
People like Alpha have a humanitarian approach to life, and that affects how they are creative.
Here is an example: He told me how, during COVID, the World Food Programme and other humanitarian agencies had problems coming into the camps in Bangladesh where almost a million refugees were being kept during the Rohingya refugee crisis.
Due to Covid restrictions, every truck with supplies for the refugees and humanitarian workers had to be checked by the guards, but they had a manual system that made it take hours to get the trucks through. Alpha and his team approached the people who ran the camps and suggested that the World Food Program develop an electronic system with QR codes that would speed up the process. This new system drastically decreased the time it took to get their trucks and humanitarian workers in.
By focusing on the guards and their operation, the World Food Programme solved its own problem (of getting the trucks in faster so it could help more refugees.) and by doing that helped the problems of the refugees, who needed food and other supplies.
Thinking of solutions that will help the greater good and everyone is easy to say, but hard for most to do.
Sometimes a dramatic crisis can help us with that. If we are stuck in a lifeboat with limited food, most of us hope and think that we would all share the food with each other and make sure that whatever food we had would be distributed in a fair way.
But in our “normal” life, human empathy, for some reason, becomes harder.
And perhaps it has become harder and harder.
During my conversation with Alpha, we talked about how “information overload” has created a world where many people feel so overwhelmed by the access to information that they consume less complex and more easily digested content. Too much information seems to make us worse at picking what information to consume. (kind of like how a huge buffet of food can make us lose our appetite.)
And in a world with mobile phones at every tragic human event, we might also be suffering from “Empathy Overload”, which could risk us becoming less empathetic and less humane as we just feel overwhelmed.
Alpha: “I think empathy has a finite limit… as humans just to stay alive because I think it’s a coping mechanism, we tend to block out things that will destroy us.”
But in a world full of terrible suffering, we need to actively develop a more robust empathic way of thinking to make sure that the empathic action that we do take is as useful and humane as possible.
Humanitarian Creativity is this ability to distance ourselves from, well, ourselves! Or at least from our own ego.
To deliberately redefine how we approach the creative process so that the end result benefits the greater good.
We need to make sure that the very human tendency to think “What’s in it for me?” when we do something is tweaked into something more universal and more humane. Because there is, almost always, a “What’s in it for me-aspect to how we think. The “trick” is how we approach it.
In Alpha’s words: “There’s nothing as self-fulfilling than giving somebody something who cannot give you anything back and telling you thanks, and put a smile on that person’s face and feel good. You feel good yourself the entire day. So, in a way, that’s your “what’s in it for me. There’s still a “what’s in it for me?” Because at the end of the day, if your objective is to put a smile on the face of a vulnerable child in a rural village, that’s what gives you satisfaction.”
In short: Humanitarian Creativity is about helping others. And doing so helps us reduce our egos. And doing that helps us be more creative.
What problem are you working on right now? How can you elevate the solution you are developing into a solution that is helping the greater good?
Stay in that mindset as long as you can, and chances are your creativity will flourish when your ego is pushed aside.
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