Columnists

Owning up to our mistakes the way to go

mistakes

Not many staff will speak out when we’ve made an error, or keep us informed on bad news. FILE PHOTO | NMG

When a producer makes a mistake, consumers deserve an apology. And last week, I made a mistake in my column: giving the URL of the KenTrade portal that I was so impressed by as its name infotrade, where the correct address is infotradekenya.go.ke (and with no www).

But a reader, Gordan, wrote, and told me I’d got it wrong, which meant I was aware of the mistake, and could get it corrected online. For the thing is, when you don’t know you have made an error, you do nothing to put it right.

It’s a point I make often with my own business team. For we get a lot of fancy talk about two-way communication, interaction, engagement and even 360-degree reviews, but most of the time, we as managers are pretty isolated in the information chain.

Not many staff will speak out when we’ve made an error, or keep us informed on bad news, which they would rather not be the bearer of.

It’s a roadblock I have seen play out a thousand times, where the CEO is the very last person to know that sales are dropping in Embakasi, or that the new switch is actually persistently faulty and was probably a procurement error, or the headmaster whose teachers are in near-rebellion, but he is the only person in the school who doesn’t know a thing about it.

I have often heard it said that we get the government we deserve, and it’s not a reference to the managers of state alone: governance covers every level of business management.

It covers consumer policy by producers, it covers staffing, and the way all decisions are taken. And deciding ‘blind’ isn’t the best way to get the best results. So speaking out as consumers get a better result for everyone. And that isn’t just the case with the bad news.

Another reader, Agnes, wrote last week, drawing my attention to another government portal I had no idea existed – and this time let me get the URL correct as kenya.eregulations.org (still no www) – which takes readers by the hand in company set-ups, business permits, immigration, land and property, courtesy of KenInvest.

Its expanse isn’t as great as infotrade, but its navigation is markedly easier, making it another awesome tool that will save trip-ups in thousands and empower individuals.

It still leaves a gap for me around the ‘doing business’ space for my seed farmers. The next service I would love to find in this firmament, as we back agriculture, and value addition, and even manufacturing, is the portal build for the Kenyan ‘boot-strapper’, or hustler: our millennials, striking out to employ themselves in our low formal-employment world.

Yet, across the infotrade and eregulation portals we are being informed as never before: and information is power. It does drive better decisions and better futures. And so very often, we are short of it, in information holes that can even kill us.

A case in point was my worst mailbag ever, on a column about out how dirty and health-damaging our air is in Nairobi, I got emails stating flatly that I was sensationalising the issue, and that my facts were just wrong. I wrote back diligently and asked for the information these were based on, and then no replies.

For that time, the error was not mine, and the speaking out was not an assertion of facts, but a resistance of facts.

The data there is shows a pollution problem of astronomical proportions, filling our bodies with chemicals we carry a lifetime and that kill us, airborne even to State House: no one escapes the heavy metals and PBTs we’re all breathing in every day in Nairobi.

Yet we do nothing because the problem is unseen. So the key to all smart policy, all smart governance, all empowered business creation, to productivity and to a better future is one: information, the good news and the bad news.

Not any agenda that only sees bad, not any agenda that only sees good. Not ego, not bias. But the facts, and speaking out in ensuring they are relayed and held to. So, thank you Gordan. And Agnes too. And my sincere apologies for that wrong URL: now corrected.