When the Weeds Grow With the Wheat: A Lesson From G19
My wife Ayele and I were supposed to be somewhere over the Atlantic right now, somewhere between Nairobi and New York, hearts full of anticipation for our son's graduation from Penn State. Instead, I am seated in the Hyatt Regency in Westlands, Nairobi, nursing the residue of what can only be described as one of the most frustrating travel experiences of my adult life — and, if I am honest, one of the most instructive.
Let me tell you what happened.
The Boarding Pass That Wasn't Mine — Except That It Was
Our journey began at Entebbe International Airport, where Kenya Airways issued my boarding pass for KQ002, Nairobi to John F. Kennedy. Everything was in order — or so we thought. It was only at the boarding gate here in Nairobi that an agent noticed something I had not: my boarding pass read Egbuson/Egbuson Fr instead of Egbuson Emebeleakpo Fr. My surname, printed twice. A clerical error — one that Kenya Airways had generated — and one that would cost us our flight, seventy-five dollars in "name change" fees, a hotel night in Nairobi, a reboooked rental car and hotel in New York, and two or three espressos I absolutely did not need.
I was sent to the Transfer Desk. It was unmanned.
I returned to the gate. A supervisor told me to go back. "There should be a man there called Richard. I just spoke with him." I went back. Richard explained, with the calm of a man performing a completely routine function, that he needed to send an email — with a copy of my passport — to the revenue center for approval of "the change." The change. As though I had arrived at the airport having decided, on a whim, to alter the name on my own ticket.
Ayele, wiser than I am in these moments, went ahead to the lounge to rest. I stayed. I pressed. I explained — more than once, and with diminishing grace — that I was not responsible for a boarding pass Kenya Airways had generated with my surname printed twice, and that I should not be penalized with a change-of-date fee for their error. I lost my cool. I am not proud of it, but I will not pretend otherwise.
Enter Mr. Ruben
And then, in the middle of all of it, a man walked up and introduced himself as the Kenya Airways Duty Manager. His name was Mr. Ruben.
Within ten to fifteen minutes, the ticket was changed. He apologized — not with the performative regret of a scripted customer service response, but with the kind of apology that communicates genuine acknowledgment. And as he wrapped things up, he looked at me and said, quietly: "Please go to the lounge. I am sure your wife is not fine without you there."
I have spent over fifteen years in the field of organizational effectiveness, coaching executives and facilitating leadership programs across East and Central Africa. I have stood in front of leadership teams and quoted Stephen Covey on the connection between frontline behavior and organizational outcomes more times than I can count. And yet, watching Mr. Ruben work, I felt it freshly — not as a concept, but as a lived reality. What we do on the frontlines of service delivery truly impacts the bottom line. Not eventually. Not abstractly. Right there, at Gate G19.
The contrast was not lost on me. The system had failed. Richard had not been unkind — he had simply been operating within the limits of what his role permitted him to imagine. Mr. Ruben arrived and expanded the frame. That is leadership. That is service recovery. That is the difference between a customer who never flies an airline again and one who writes about the Duty Manager by name.
The Parable, Revisited
Now I am in the hotel room, and I am thinking about a sermon.
Pastor Steven Furtick, preaching from Matthew 13, drew on the Parable of the Weeds — the story of a man who sows good seed in his field, only for an enemy to come and sow weeds among the wheat while everyone slept. When the servants discover the weeds growing alongside the wheat, they ask: Should we pull them up? The master's answer is striking: No. Because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest.
Pastor Furtick's invitation was this: stop trying to judge and uproot every difficult circumstance in your life. The Lord is the owner of the Seed — the One who produces the fruit. And He is also the owner of the furnace, where the weeds, bundled together, will ultimately be dealt with. Our job is not to manage the harvest. Our job is to trust the One who tends the field.
Sitting in that transfer area, I had appointed myself master of the field. I was pulling at weeds with both hands — trying to fix what I could not fix, trying to force a resolution that was not mine to force. I kept asking myself: How am I responsible for a boarding pass with my own surname printed twice? A fair question. But the better question — the one I kept missing in my frustration — was: What is being produced in me through this?
The Space Between
The developmental psychologist Robert Kegan has observed that it is very difficult to sustain significant changes in behavior without significant changes in the underlying meanings that give rise to those behaviors. We do not change what we do until we change what we believe about the situation we are in.
Viktor Frankl, writing from the depths of an experience infinitely more severe than a missed flight, put it this way: between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom — our capacity to use imagination, self-awareness, conscience, and will to choose our response. Stephen Covey built much of his life's work on that single insight.
I did not always find that space today. But I found it eventually. And I am writing from within it now.
My son is graduating from Penn State. That is not diminished by a delayed flight, a name printed twice, or a night in Nairobi I did not plan. The wheat is still growing. The harvest is still coming.
And somewhere in the middle of a difficult afternoon, a man named Mr. Ruben reminded me — without meaning to, without knowing he was doing it — that one person, with the right posture and the right authority, can reframe everything.
That is true of Duty Managers. It is true of leaders. And if Kegan is right — if meaning precedes behavior — then it is also true of each of us, in whatever field we have been placed to tend.
Comments
Post a Comment