Please do not disturb…. the flow

 In football, unless you are gifted with trickeries like Ronaldinho you cannot afford to “kill the ball”, meaning when the ball comes to you it must stay alive, keep it rolling. Else, instead of freeing the space around you and trigger a forward action with grit, you end up putting immense pressure on yourself and the team.

The most creative instinct to keeping the ball alive is to set a “contrôle orienté” or a “crochet”, namely – not necessarily with the sparkle of Lionel Messi. During the Euro 2024, the England team, despite the undeniable talent within, was so gripped with individual strain that the players merely resorted to the “kill the ball” mode most of the time. They were thus unable to perform collectively and live up to expectations.

The takeaway from the analogy above is relevant for everyday life. Simply put, to keep the flow strive to stay connected to vibrant and virtuous elements. At the outset, it consists of identifying a maximum of obstacles, most visible but some not so much, and bottlenecks. Failing to do so whether at individual, local, national or international level is bound to turn counterproductive as resources are devoted to an invalid assessment of the situation.

Even some of physicist Richard Feynman’s intellectual agility to connect seemingly disparate dots across disciplines would be a blessing in the area of policymaking, and anywhere else for that matter. How we collect and process information is key to sound decision making. For instance, we would be spared much misery in commuting if the expertise to ease road traffic was not practically hooked on displacing bottlenecks and siphoning a massive share of public funds, as consistently exposed by the National Audit Office.

When this curse so short on variables and so devoid of coherence cuts across the whole system, disrupting institutions, logistics, utilities, industrialisation, ecosystem, know-how and constantly gnawing at the social ladder, reactionary forces are unleashed. In their wake, people’s brain pain fatally leads to brain drain that will haunt any nation for years to come. Urban planners and anthropologists, it’s your time, the sham has lasted too long!