Manila, 22 March 2021 — Are you focused on the core problem?

Story

Happy World Water Day 2021, this year with a theme of Valuing Water. How do you value water? What does water mean to you in the Decisive Decade to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? In particular, how do value water: 

• from your tap ~ hopefully, you don’t have to walk far to collect safe water for your basic needs, and you already have good sanitation and hygiene — how do we make sure that everyone’s basic needs are met?

• from sky and river ~ that we receive with increasingly unpredictable timing and intensity, and often either not enough or too much?

• in the oceans ~ that are increasingly polluted with plastic, melting ice caps, and bleaching corals?

With our unprecedented levels of wealth, technology, and data, why do we still face such an alarming difficulty in managing the planet’s water resources to ensure water security for our communities, economies, and ecosystems? What makes progress so hard and elusive?

Paradoxically, our predicament to achieve SDG#6 for Clean Water and Sanitation is not as difficult as you might think. However, by pursuing an ever more comprehensive ‘systems’ approach of all the factors involved, we are at risk of failing to focus on what matters most.

Challenge

So what's the challenge we are at risk of overlooking in our race to solve the world’s water security problems? As often happens, experts with another perspective can shed light on this. And that’s exactly what happened some years ago. During the CEO roundtable at the Asia-Pacific Water Summit in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in a smallish room on top of the main conference hall, it took the gathered business leaders and summit hosts less than half an hour to cut through the complexity of solving the region’s water security challenges. And they did so with a smile. 

After listening to each other’s brief introductions, they concluded that the main obstacle was not to be found in technology, finance, or law, but instead in the persistent communication problems that prevent businesses, governments, and civil society from working together more effectively. In other words, the core problem they saw was a people problem rather than a water problem. And they understood that it could only be solved by learning to speak each other’s language and work together.

The core problem identified by the business leaders is, in truth, not an easy one to solve. All over the world, our daily news headlines show how difficult it is for people to collaborate. Moreover, in our ever more comprehensive analysis of the water security problems in our world, it's both easy and tempting to take collaboration for granted and thereby overlook this persistent core problem.

Question

By and large, water professionals and managers already have a good understanding of water security. Yet we are still struggling with the people problem of creating positive changes at the speed and scale required. Taking our cue from the business leaders at the summit in Thailand, that challenge starts with ourselves, to change fixed mindsets and learn to use more effective ways of communication to make collaboration happen. 

Making our way forward to achieve SDG#6 (and the other SDGs) is, at heart, a problem of how to change people’s mindsets and behaviors to collaborate: it’s a challenge of leadership. That’s why, on World Water Day and every day, we must go beyond valuing water to value people and partnering to work together.

Assuming (correctly, I hope) that you’re buying into this challenge, the real question then becomes: how are you growing more leaders around you to make the SDGs happen, starting with influencing positive changes in your workplace?