IIBA Was Worse Than Cancer: When Silence Fell
At the beginning of February 2014 I had a rare face-to-face meeting with my boss at IIBA®. We’ve been friends for almost ten years, since back when we were both volunteers there. He’s a nice guy. He was firing me.
I knew what the meeting was about, of course. He didn’t say anything beforehand, but then, no one at IIBA was saying much of anything to me at all. It was the culmination of about a year of increasingly difficult times for me in that organization. I was the single largest content producer there for quite a while (webinars, newsletter articles, quick tips, best practices, BABOK® Guide v3, and conferences) but there was a steep decrease in my output in the months leading up to my removal. Part of this was so I could focus on my new portfolio, Head of Research and Innovation (R&I). I handed Quick Tips for Better Business Analysis (QT4BBA) and webinars to Marueen. Paul had Best Practices for Better Business Analysis (BP4BBA) from the start, but I stopped trying to write for it.
At the time, I was building an international team of volunteer researchers to delve in to the scientific side of business analysis. We developed a cohesive systems theory of organizational performance that generated testable hypothesis, and were building experimental designs. The intent was to partner with Corporate Members to do the research, hopefully directly improving their performance while allowing us to strengthen the Organizational Systems Performance Theory. A green paper, laying out the core of the theory and the research strategy, was published several months after my group was shut down and I was let go. It’s still a pretty good read.* It’s the last thing from IIBA with my name as author.
Beyond the things I handed off, I was told to stop the BABOK® Guide v3 webinars. That ended the related articles in the BA Connection Newsletter. I wrote other articles on other topics but these never made it to print or were never distributed the way they were intended. I was removed from the BABOK® Guide v3 Core Team. Later, I was removed from the BABOK® Guide v3 Editorial Team.
You may be thinking words like ‘isolated’ and ‘side lined’. I certainly felt silenced, but at the time I didn’t understand the crippling psychological implications of what was happening to me. I fell into a depression (or reasonable facsimile thereof). It became harder and harder to find the motivation to do my job. I lost sleep. My relationship with my wife suffered. (More accurately, my wife suffered, and still supported me thought it.) I was intensely frustrated. I drank too much. I didn’t see friends enough. Eventually, I pretty much gave up.
For most people not being heard at work isn’t a life changing event. You could probably shake off being silenced. But I am my words. Without them my sense of self is in crisis. Telling the world of your thoughts is not everyone’s calling, but it is part of mine. It isn’t something I can work around; I can’t clock in, do the job, clock out, and then do the stuff you love, because it is the stuff I love.
Imagine losing a part of yourself that meant you couldn’t do that thing you loved ever again? Are you a runner? No legs. A painter? Blinded. A surgeon? Peripheral neuropathy. A business analyst? Aphasia. A project manager? Stroke-induced deficits in planning.
Think about the things that make your life worth living, that give you purpose in this world. Who would you be if those were taken from you? Sure, you’d still be a person. You wouldn’t be the same person.
My grandfather taught me this lesson a long time ago: you are more than what you do. It’s an important lesson, but it has limits. At some level there are core elements of what you can do tied up in who you are. My sister is a traveler, for example. If she could never see another part of the world again she’d still be her — but different. She would have to find new ways of being in the world to accommodate this loss of something so intrinsic to her nature. Julian without the ability to communicate isn’t the same person. Still a person, but a person in a crisis of identity.
Cancer was the third round of being silenced for me. IIBA was the first, and the worst. I didn’t really understand what the psychic toll was, and why it was so hard to shake, and I didn’t see any way around it. When I lost my voice again after that, we thought it was a nodule on my vocal cord. We treated for that and I regained the ability to speak, though my voice was quite different from before. I did some conferences and contracts, and was out helping people reframe their worldviews again. Then the nodule turned out to be cancer, and came the day of the short knives.
Losing my voice this time has caused emotional ripples where the first time was a tsunami. There is something to be said for practice, though I wouldn’t wish this practice on anyone, but the real difference is not the result of practice alone. I have found new ways to share my words with the world, in text and in speech. Despite this being the third assault on a core aspect of who I am, this cancer isn’t an assault on who I am. Cutting my physical voice cut out of my flesh with knives didn’t take away my words, because I’ve found ways to be more than what I do.
My purpose has long been to help people by showing them a different way to be in the world. Cancer has changed how I seek that goal but done nothing to the goal itself. You should read the name of my Facebook group, There Are No Words, as a challenge and not capitulation. No words you say? I’ll find a way. And if the words go to, I’ll find another way to be more than what I can do.
The lesson for all of you is a Spartan one. Every day, make a short ritual of imagining profound loss. Intentionally seek out in your mind that which you can not live without, and imagine that it is gone forever. Savour the loss, the hurt, the fear, the pain. Savour it like you savour a roller coaster or haunted house: a safe-but-thrilling event. Let those feelings shape your understanding of just how important that that thing is to you, and then when it feels the worst, let all the imaginings go. Revel in the joy of knowing that it is not too late to act. Start making contingency plans to cushion the blow if something does take it away. Engage deeply with it now, because tomorrow is uncertain.
Don’t let silence fall. It is in you to be more than what you do.
Be well.
Julian Sammy
@sci_ba
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* “Improving Business Analysis Performance: A systems model for evidence-based performance improvement” was distributed by IIBA® to reviewers and contributors as a PDF, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. It is available online to IIBA members through BP4BBA at http://www.iiba.org/ba-connect/2014/may/bp4bba.aspx.
