Congress needs more interdependency

Editor,

My experience as a counselor and consultant informs me that the cause of our elected Congressmen being unable to resolve any of the problems we currently have is obvious, and that cause is that those Congressmen do not talk to each other.

I found this to be the situation once when I was hired as a consultant because a company was experiencing this situation and did not know how to resolve it — their software personnel and hardware personnel were never sitting down together to try to find solutions to the problems they were having as they tried to implement a new radar system at a remote site in Turkey.

After sitting in on several meetings, I became aware that this was the problem. I informed the vice president who had hired me of this and he asked me what I thought should be done. I advised him to schedule a meeting to take place at 3 p.m. as soon as possible and require all software and hardware personnel to attend and work on arriving at a solution to a specific problem.

Very little happened during that meeting except for name-calling and finger-pointing.

When 5 p.m. arrived and the meeting ended, the vice president said to me, “Well, that didn’t work. What do you suggest we do now?” I replied “Require them all to be in another meeting to resolve the same problem tomorrow at 3 p.m.”

He did that and at some point, one of the hardware personnel said something that resulted in a response from one of the software personnel to the effect that a suspected hardware problem was in fact caused by a glitch in the software.

The atmosphere in the room instantly changed and those present began to work cooperatively and interdependently to resolve the problems that were preventing them from completing the project they were working on, and the project was successfully completed.
Interestingly enough, Franklin Roosevelt became aware at some point while he was president that the members of the two political parties in Congress were never talking to each other and ordered them to meet and seek a solution to a particular problem until they had arrived at a consensus method of trying to resolve that problem. They did that because the president has the authority to require that of them, and then they proceeded to work, interdependently, on arriving at resolutions to other problems.

It is a given fact that it is only when people work interdependently together that problems get resolved and there is compassionate cooperation that results in a functional society.

May it soon be that our Congressmen will begin talking with each other and striving to interdependently arrive at solutions to the problems we have instead of just calling each other names and pointing fingers so that our country can once again become the country brought into existence by the Founding Fathers.

Robert Gardiner
Daily Lobo reader