How to release Colombia´s potential
When you visit Colombia it’s not uncommon to be surprised by the kindness of its people, who will charm you with their smiles and good manners. But if you stay in Colombia for a little longer, as an expat perhaps, or as a national as well, you will also be exposed to a less charming side of the Colombian culture: customer service. Whether you deal with a bank or an Internet or a Cellular Phone Service Provider, the experience will be similar: nobody seems to be able to resolve your issue in an efficient way.
In my view, this difficulty stems from 1, a lack of accountability, and 2, a historical fear of being direct about what you want, and why you want it.
These cultural realities not only affect customer service, they impact nearly all aspects of life in Colombia. We are left to think that in a country with so many resources and enormous potential, couldn´t things just work a little bit better; maybe even a lot better?
But how do you change a culture that has been long ingrained in a country’s society? The most logical place to begin is education: education is the surest road to impact the way a group of people do things, think about things, approach things, the best way to shape the beliefs, attitudes and values, that underpinning culture.
Here´s the problem
Being a hierarchical society, structured with a centralized government, Colombians, for the most part, have been taught to accept what the teacher says, what the boss says, without much questioning.
Research has not been a significant part of any syllabus, let alone creating or thinking out of the box.
What has the impact of this been? You become comfortable letting others decide, letting others tell you what to do. Then it is not up to you to resolve an issue, let the big ones do it, let the boss decide, but the boss has a boss, and then the big boss is too busy and it simply isn’t their job to resolve the smaller issues that the lower ranks of the organization weren’t able to resolve. So, no one is able to give you an answer, to resolve.
At a political level, you become too comfortable too, waiting for the government to resolve your issues, you don’t feel empowered to resolve your own; you are simply not prepared to think that as a community you can come up with ideas, actions, and approaches to make your life so much better.
The end result of going through life like this, as I see it, is that you may either develop a certain sense of content or a certain passive aggressiveness. Isn’t it paradoxical that Colombia, having experienced violence at every single level (a result of passive aggressiveness) often times appears in surveys as one of the happiest peoples on earth?
The thing with education as a tool to change culture is that it’s truly expensive in resources and in time; too much to allow it to be in the agenda of politicians; so much that it would require thinking above and beyond our own selfish interests; that it would call on politicians, entrepreneurs and the civil society at large to agree on the most fundamental things: Who are we now? How do we want to see ourselves in the future? What values and beliefs do we want to define us? What legacy do we want to leave future generations?
The day Colombians come to such an agreement and are able to draw the roadmap to execute such an ambitious action plan, democracy will truly reach maturity and I believe the foreigner and the national will be able to find excelling customer service, and that warmth of heart that still distinguishes Colombians for who they truly are.
Lord, protect us from educators.
Colombia already generates a huge amount of money but most of it ends up overseas. Colombia has an ownership problem and a debt slavery problem. Colombian people already think outside the box, the poor are more resourceful than anybody needs to ever be in northern countires.
As for the violence being the result of passive aggressiveness, much the greater part of violence in Colombia is not spontaneous but rather subsidised by paymasters, often rural and again, about ownership. Why? because it generates a lot of wealth. Where? Overseas.
You are doing what this blog seems to specialise in – blaming Colombia and Colombians. Isn’t hoping to eliminate poverty by blaming the poor a bit like trying to eliminate rape by blaming women?
Estela, this website supports and promotes Colombia. The author of this article is Colombian. This piece isn´t about poverty, but how things could work better in Colombia if the people were more empowered. Best wishes, Kevin.
Thankyou for your response, Kevin.
It seems you are trying to call off-topic on my point.
I am not sure how you hope to deny the obvious links between empowerment from wealth/poverty. They are certainly clearer than the links between empowerment and good customer service.
I am saying that empowerment is an ownership issue; the author is saying that it depends on education.
If you publish an article called, How to Release Colombia’s Potential, and the article focuses on issues like customer service and education, it will be presumed that you believe customer services and education are key to releasing Colombia’s potential. I don’t think they are, not even close. Because the author pinpoints aspects of Colombian culture as responsible for failure in ‘releasing potential’, whilst ignoring external factors, this article is a bit disrespectful to Colombia. Furthurmore, placing an irrelevance centre-stage is misleading. Alleging that I am off-topic for calling an irrelevance is specious logic.
Hi Estela, I don´t think the article attempts to highlight everything that holds Colombia back. Clearly there are plenty of external forces at work, as well as the internal conflict, complex geography, corruption…en fin… Although I didn´t write this article, I certainly share its belief that education, and the way in which a nation is educated has a significant impact on its ability to thrive. You say “Lord, protect us from educators” – that´s something we´d disagree wildely on. Thanks for contributing to the debate. Always good to hear alternative points of view on the site. Cheers.
Education is a wide term. A parent teaching a child how to peel a banana is education; travel is an education; a conversation is an education.
By ‘educators’ I mean (and I realise I didn’t make it clear) people who are in the business of making money, be it a pitiful wage or a generous profit, out of educating other people’s children. In Colombia, the most profitable business for educators is private education. Parents pay. The more they pay, the greater the advantage they expect the education will bestow upon their children and, at least subconsciously, educators aspire to this class of client. In Colombia, the parents who can pay most are often exactly those families who have been marrying their first cousins for most of the last 200 years. This deeply anti-democratic and anti-republican culture must affect educators at some level and, in my experience, does.
Now I am off-topic. Maybe we could have a new article to discuss this issue. Perhaps the author would like to contribute something.
Estela, many will agree with you on that point! Why don´t you write us a article on this point? It´s an interesting and important argument to be heard. Thanks.
I´m glad to see I´ve generated some debate. Thanks for responding to the points I raised in the article. I hope I can answer some of the questions you raise.
Absolutely, my article wanted to tackle an ambitious topic, and yes, I was aware I was probably touching on a very profound topic ever so slightly superficially.
As far as the disconnection between customer service and empowerment, I must defend my approach because customer service, being present in everyday life, serves the purpose of showing how the common individual approaches life, and how disempowered, we as Colombians act, most of the time. And from that aspect I went on to talk about our attitude in politics and other issues, like violence and contentment.
The article did not focus on the poor specifically, but about our society at large and it meant to address the fact that we are not accountable. I also expressed that, I feel, accountability and empowerment are values that can be taught through a certain model of education, which again, the article didn’t pretend to describe at length.
Both accountability and empowerment, as values, can help unleash the full potential of a nation full of riches, and help make things better.
As far as the comment “Lord, protect us from Educators” I am not sure I completely disagree because in order to scrap out the old education model, we would need to begin by retraining educators for sure. This poses the first challenge to a new model of education or that “new canvass” that Michael mentions.
On the other hand, the article did not touch on the poor; therefore it does not belittle this social class. It takes a critical stance and it doesn’t “blame” anyone, but again it calls for accountability and empowerment.
The belief that: “Colombia already generates a huge amount of money but most of it ends up overseas” would be subject of a different debate, where I would greatly differ from Estela. In such a debate we would have to touch on the issue of the distribution of wealth in the country.
Nevertheless, to tie it in with my article, I would say that, contrary to Estela’s premise, there is ample evidence that the majority of the resources generated by the country stay in the country. Take transfers of money generated from the extraction of oil and gas that go from the state to the departments, for instance.
In my view, it is due to the lack of empowerment from the civil society which does not understand that it is their right and obligation to hold politicians accountable for the use of these transfers, that the resources go to waste rather than ease the needs of that poor class which strives to get by, constantly being pushed to think outside the box, and furthering people to live beyond survival mode.
That is precisely my point. Surely there are external factors, there will always be, but you cannot stop at that. I can’t help dreaming of a more accountable and empowered society, I know we can; it’s a matter of political will, of wanting to agree to be.
I am glad the article stirred the comments it did. Thanks again for contributing to what I think is an important debate.
The author has taken on some ambitious themes, and put forward some questionable comments about Colombian culture…
But I couldn’t get past the initial complaint that banks, internet and cellphone companies have bad customer service.
Uh.
Where in the world aren’t banks, internet and cellphone companies complete jackholes when it comes to their clients? That plus airlines is almost entirely the content of the 15 worst companies with customer service http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/09/worst-customer-service_n_2434067.html
The companies mentioned in the above link are in the US, original home of the tip and good service.
Do they need more research projects too? Who are we kidding? What legacy monopoly / oliogopoly systems don’t lead to terrible, defensive customer service?
The issue with customer service is not cultural as much as systemic due to the market being dominated by a few major players that are as similar as Kang and Kodos. But then this isn’t that different from some markets to the north.
How’s customer service in a tienda?
Hi Stephen, customer service in a tienda is always great as far as I´m concerned, as is the small restaurant. Basically anything owned by the person working there, directly or indirectly almost always offers great service. Cheers.
“for the most part, have been taught to accept what the teacher says, what the boss says, without much questioning.”
This is true of every current country in the world! The schooling systems all work perfectly keeping this in place. The ‘system’ does not want a billion… much less seven billion intelligent people empowered to change the world.
Education as described needs to be completely scrapped… if you want to change things.
The internet is already making it possible. …
Back to your original premise. Customer service.. I have been here nearly ten years. Some places are beyond exceptional and others cater to an older ‘cultural’ way of doing things. The ‘problem’ here is the same ‘problem’ everywhere. GOV and it’s rules and regulations that were put into play for a certain purpose and intention. When will GOV [planet wide by the way] begin removing regulations and rules that do not work, that have caused as much or more harm than the good intentions they were written to produce?
A LOT of what happens here is remarkable, exceptional and leading edge. Just because it is done elsewhere doesn’t mean to me it should be done here.
Empowering, enabling and rewarding brilliance, achievement and outside the box thinking is what is called for worldwide. How to implement THAT is actually not rocket science. I do not believe ‘schools’ are where to look to find it however. Their purpose is ‘for the most part, have been taught to accept what the teacher says, what the boss says, without much questioning.’ Teaching people how to react to authority is ALL schools do. Everything else supports that. A new canvas is called for. The old one did it’s job.