The Question We Are Not Asking: Why Do We Do It This Way?

Every country that has transformed itself has done so on the back of an unglamorous habit: the discipline of examining how work gets done, and refusing to accept that the current way is the only way.

In my book ‘Digital Namibia: From Paper to Progress’, I traced our journey from paper administration towards digital government, and the opportunities that still lie ahead.

But digitisation, on its own, is not transformation. If we take a broken process and put it on a computer, we have simply built a faster way to frustrate people.

The technology conversation in Namibia has matured. The process conversation has barely begun.

A business process centric mindset starts with three questions that every worker, from a clerk in a regional council to an executive in a boardroom, should ask daily: why do I do it like this?

Is this the best way to do it?

How can I make this faster, simpler and better for the person waiting on the other side?

These questions sound modest. They are not.

They are quietly radical, because they challenge the most powerful force in any organisation: habit.

Much of what we do at work, in both the public and private sectors, is inherited practice.

A form exists because it has always existed. A document requires three signatures because it required three signatures in 1995.

Nobody remembers why. Nobody asks.

The process outlives its purpose, and citizens and customers pay the price in queues, delays and duplicated effort.

Japan rebuilt itself after the war on a philosophy called kaizen: continuous, incremental improvement, driven not by consultants but by the people doing the work.

The insight was simple.

The person closest to the process sees its waste most clearly.

What they need is permission to question it, and a culture that rewards them for doing so rather than treating the question as insubordination.

That is the cultural shift Namibia needs.

STAGNANT SILENCES

Too often, in our institutions, questioning how things are done is read as criticism of the person who does them, or worse, of the person who designed them.

So people keep quiet, follow the procedure, and the inefficiency compounds year after year.

We have normalised waiting. We should be normalising asking.

Leaders carry particular responsibility here.

A process-centric culture cannot be delegated to an IT department or announced in a strategy document.

It is built when an executive director asks a directorate to map its most complained-about process end to end, and then removes the steps that add no value.

It is built when a manager thanks the junior employee who points out that a report nobody reads takes two days to compile.

It is built when improvement becomes part of everyone’s job description, not an initiative with a launch date and an end date.

FROM DIGITAL TO DELIBERATE

There is also a generational dimension.

Every process we tolerate today is a process we bequeath. The queues we accept become the queues our children stand in.

Conversely, every form simplified, every approval step removed, every service moved from days to minutes is a gift to the next generation.

Leaving things better than we found them should not be a slogan. It should be the standard by which we measure a career.

Namibia has made real progress from paper to digital.

The next chapter is from digital to deliberate: institutions that examine themselves continuously, and workers who treat improvement as their own responsibility.

It begins with one honest question, asked at your own desk, about your own work, today. Why do I do it like this?

– Job Angula is the author of ‘Digital Namibia: From Paper to Progress’ and writes on technology governance and digital transformation.

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