How do we stay relevant in an ever-changing world? Rev. Ronald David, M.D. began this discussion by announcing a change in the title and focus of the presentation. How apropos?  

With a new title, “Remaining Relevant and Relational in the Midst of Change,” Dr. David took us on a delightful journey through the cosmos to demonstrate the inter-relatedness of everything in our universe and how, as local government managers, we should embrace the relational elements of our jobs to be more effective.

“Relationships are primary; all else is derivative,” he explained to a packed ballroom on Tuesday. This key point is true from the “subatomic realm of cosmos to complex social systems that local government managers work in.”

To illustrate the degree of inter-relatedness of all things in the cosmos, Dr. David pointed to the most abundant element in the universe: hydrogen. “If we look at all of the mass of atoms in the universe, 90 percent are hydrogen,” he said. “One hundred percent of the atoms in our universe – in our body – are left over or ‘born at’ the time of the Big Bang. We are the ultimate in recycled products,” he said, eliciting laughs from the crowd.

Dr. David explained “compassionate” myocardial cells. In a Petri dish, they beat together in unison. Moved apart, they will beat out of rhythm. Moved further away from each other will cause them to stop beating entirely. However, if you reunite out of sync heart cells before the cease beating, they beat again in synch with each other. The same is true, he explained, with human beings. Our behaviors and reactions fall in step with the behaviors and reactions of the people around us, or to use Desmond Tutu’s famous words, “A person is a person through another person.”

To make the case, Dr. David shared scientific research showing how we mirror each other in very fundamental ways. For example, one-day old babies in a scientific study imitated their mother’s expressions. He showed the audience photographs from a study of people who appeared to be in pain, only to reveal that these were caregivers whose expressions were compassionate manifestations of caring for a person who was experiencing the actual pain. Then, he showed the crowd two tuning forks and demonstrated how one fork will emit the same pitch when the other in close proximity is struck.

So, we’re all related. Our behaviors and responses have a direct correlation to the behaviors and responses of others. What does that mean for local government managers and how they do their jobs?  

Dr. David stated that “we all live in a space between order and chaos, certainty and uncertainty.

We live in a world of constancy when, in fact, the universe since the Big Bang is ever-changing.”

Managers, he said, stand out by the way in which they manage change. He even offered that the best managers probably welcome change to test the limits of their creativity in problem-solving.

He posed this question: “How would public policy change if we:

a.)    love people and use things rather than love things and use people; and

b.)    get things done out of love for people rather than using people to get things done?”

Citing Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, he told the audience that “disaster could be called a crash course in Buddhist principles of compassion, abandoning the illusion of separateness, of being fully present, of fearlessness in the face of uncertainty.” He explained how Solnit claimed that when you witness disaster, your compassion is awakened. You snap out of your daily life that we seem to sleepwalk through and abandon our feelings of separateness. This is why first responders often fearlessly storm into dangerous situations.

We are all related. We are in this together. Dr. David closed his speech with a final, simple request: “Go in peace to love and serve one another.”