Thought of The Day YMLP 2015

Assalamualaikum all

This is the tenth day of the programme and the first day of our self-run thoughts of the day.

I spent some time last night thinking about what would make an interesting topic for this and after writing and deleting a number of attempts decided to talk about human nature and to keep it fresh by exploring what happened just yesterday while its fresh in our minds.

I’m going to focus on our guided tour of the Islamic Gallery at the british museum with the curator. In case you’ve forgotten we’d had a pretty early start and by the time of the tour we’d already visited the Houses of Parliament. 

So, the first thing to strike me was the approach that the curator took. No phones, no food, no fun. Listen to me and do nothing else. At the time I remember thinking (to quote Ali) “WTF? This is a bit stifling.” And from the quiet chats I had with a number of you I know I was not alone in thinking this. Been a long day and the last thing we wanted was to be treated like little children. At this stage I also knew nothing about her beyond she was a curator. So to my eyes we had this random middle aged lady aggressively talking at us about objects of limited personal interest – to me at least – and my mind was totally switched off and in fact I was discreetly on my phone hiding behind Afnan. You might remember Raiyan tried similar but didn’t have my experience in hiding phone usage and got caught. And on top of that to be honest I don’t even remember what the first items were that we saw. All I remember thinking is This is ridiculous - I am super bored and how can I disrupt this class?

Now that was my perspective. I want to take a moment to empathise and look at it through her eyes. And obviously this is all conjecture but I think its reasonable conjecture.

We have a busy woman taking time out of her more enjoyable tasks to do one of the more usually thankless duties of her job. She knows the objects on display very well and has taken that tour countless times before and could do it with her eyes closed. Most likely with bored school kids and other captive audiences like us who pay her zero attention while she imparts what she considers to be wisdom and knowledge. And its quite likely that for her to not feel like she’s wasting her valuable time and effort she wants to have the appearance that her audience is actually listening – which leads to her insistence on no phones and food and allows her to say her spiel without interruption.

So what do we do? The audience is bored and the speaker is bored. There’s no connection between the two and no one is enjoying the situation.

It was at this point she opened up to questions and if you remember I asked her about her background as I wanted to hear about something else that the artefacts and personal histories fascinate me and it seemed a good way to be subtly disruptive. The question turned out to surprise her and throw her completely off the track she was on – really not something I was expecting at the time if im honest. But she answered at length and after the other questions that Ali and Dr Mustafa asked we now had a better understanding of who she was and the hard work she was doing to preserve muslim heritage and history – which is actually our heritage and history and something we should be grateful to her and her kind of people for.

And all that made me much more appreciative and attentive. I finally recognised that we had an expert in our midst who was doing work which was benefit to all of us. To my mind the mood in the gallery visibly changed and the curator herself relaxed by several levels which made her much more pleasant to listen to.

And from that point I remember a lot more of what we saw. Around the lamps if you remember she was asking questions of us – one particular was “Where did the memluke kings reign?”. I just threw out Syria as a random guess and followed it with Iran. While I’d heard of the Memluke kings I didn’t have the foggiest idea where they were from. But she heard Syria and that random chance led her to think that we were a knowledgeable audience and not a bunch of numpties and again she relaxed and felt more comfortable. By the end of the tour she had no issue with phones and people wandering to look at other displays and likely didn’t even notice as she was so engaged with explaining the artefacts to the core group who stayed around and demonstrated interest.

So that’s the story – what are the lessons? Quite possible that you may draw different lessons but to me the first is that if you are going to lead a group the most effective way is to recognise who they are and make sure they know who you are. You can’t lead without credibility and credibility has to be earned. To begin with the curator did not do this and we were all completely switched off and looking for ways to escape! Build a connection and make it personal. Put yourself in their position and recognise their issues so you can get to know who you’re collaborating with and once you do you can simply just watch how the world changes around you!

Second lesson is that people in general are quite simple no matter how senior or important they might be. They love to talk about themselves and be asked for their ‘expert’ opinion. Show an interest in issues that they are interested in and they will come to you a metaphorically long way. For example at dinner I’ve sat next to the Director twice now and for the first dinner we mostly made small talk about the weather and how ‘nice’ the food was. But the second time I and the people around me managed to discover his secret interest – Recent and contemporary Indian history. Actually not so secret as he is a historian and it should’ve been fairly obvious. And once we got onto the topic of madrasas in india we saw a whole other side to him and one that I really enjoyed seeing and talking to. And with that thought I’m going to close.