WorkLore

Supply chain disruptions. 

How many times have we heard this phrase in the last two years? A global pandemic, renewed warfare involving a major petro-state, various supply chain disruptors have wreaked havoc on global supply chains and travel. 

In one post not long ago about supply chain disruptions, someone posted “no man is an island” and the literature lover in me perked up. The phrase is from the Meditations of John Donne, a 17^th century preacher better known as a poet and someone who probably didn’t really worry about global supply. 

Now I know, you’re thinking “poetry, ugh!” but listen to what Donne actually says after that famous phrase: 

No man is an island entire of itself; 

every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; 

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, 

as well as if a promontory were, 

as well as any manor of thy friends or of thine own were; 

any man’s death diminishes me, 

because I am involved in mankind. 

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; 

it tolls for thee.

It’s those last lines that Hemingway used as to title For Whom the Bell Tolls where Donne is referring to church bells that would ring at the start of a funeral service. 

What Donne is saying here is that every person means something and whenever we lose one of us, just like when a piece of the earth fall into the sea or a house is washed away, we are diminished. All of us. Because we are all human beings. And that’s why sending someone to ask who has died is irrelevant because we are all connected. 

No one of us is all alone and the loss of one of us diminishes our collective humanity. The major workplace disruptions, downsizings, quiet quitting, great resignation, all of these shifts don’t just affect those to whom they happen. They are affecting all of us. 

When we talk of companies, we talk as if they are some thing that exists outside of human endeavour. But they are composed by human beings. Sometimes we forget that when we talk about companies or supply chains as if they weren’t composed of humans as well as things. 

Since today is Bell’s Let’s Talk day for mental health, maybe reminding ourselves that humans are part of all of our systems will remind us that our decisions about systems and the problems that we encounter with systems, are also people problems.