Gettin' Stuff Done: "Does The System Work?"

A reflection from Richmond Hill Director of Operations, Dr. Lana Van Essen, about the way certain systems tend towards exploitation rather than care.

I have a confession to make about systems. I love them. Give me a process map, a workflow, a well-built spreadsheet, and something peaceful happens in my brain. I love seeing a thing run smoothly and knowing that the right information gets to the right person at the right time. As someone who did her doctoral work in Leadership and has spent years in operations, let’s just say that I have built a lot of systems, and I have been proud of that work.

But over time, I have had to learn a harder question than “does this system work?” The harder question is: who does it work for?

In Acts 16, Paul and his companions arrive in Philippi, a Roman colony. They are doing the work, planting the faith, moving through a city full of people, when they encounter a girl. We don’t know her name. The text tells us she was enslaved, that she had a spirit that allowed her to predict the future, and that her owners were making a very good profit from her gift. She carried layered oppressions, one on top of another: she was not free, she was female in a world that gave women very little standing, and her most intimate spiritual capacity had been turned into a revenue stream for someone else. She was, by almost every measure the ancient world offered, a person the system had already decided to use up.

She follows Paul for many days, crying out: “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are proclaiming to you the way of salvation.”

Then the text tells us something I think we need to sit with. Paul cast out the spirit because he was greatly annoyed, not because he was moved by her suffering or because he looked at her layered oppression and felt compelled to act on her behalf. He was annoyed. And the text just says that, without blinking, as if it mirrors something true about how we often end up doing the right thing for the wrong reason, or doing the right thing for one person while still being shaped by our own convenience.

The moment the spirit leaves her, her owners “saw that their hope of profit was gone” and seized Paul and Silas. The system reacted, not to her suffering, but to the disruption of revenue. She had been in that condition for who knows how long, and no one moved until the profit dried up. Systems tolerate suffering until profit is disturbed.

And then the girl disappears from the story entirely. The text follows Paul and Silas into prison, into the earthquake, and into their freedom. She had a name. The story never stops to tell us what it was. Paul disrupted something real, but the text gives us no evidence of a plan for what her life would look like on the other side of that disruption, and that silence is its own kind of commentary. Liberation without a road forward is still a form of leaving someone behind.

I was recently leading a workshop for our staff on Resonant Leadership, drawing on Daniel Goleman’s research, and one thing kept coming up: the difference between leaders who enforce systems and those who are attuned to people. Goleman describes resonant leaders as emotionally intelligent in a very particular way. They have what he calls Social Awareness, and within that, specifically the competency of Organizational Awareness: the capacity to read the currents of power in a room, to see who has voice, who is centered, and who the organization is quietly making invisible. Paired with Empathy, the ability to sense what others feel and to consider their perspective, this is what people-first leadership looks like in practice. It is the capacity to notice the girl who has been following you for many days before you are annoyed enough to do something about it.

Dissonant leadership, by contrast, enforces the system without asking who it is serving. It is often efficient, well-meaning, and deeply committed to keeping things running, but it reads the process before it reads the person, and when the process and the person come into conflict, the process wins.

So how do we know when we have crossed from managing a system to being managed by one?

When you find yourself explaining a policy before you have heard the person in front of you, the system is running the room. When the process feels more important than the outcome for the actual human the process is supposed to serve, the system is running the room. When the people most impacted by a system had the least input in building it, the system is running the room. And when a problem only becomes visible, or urgent, once someone with power or profit is inconvenienced, the system has been running the room for a long time.

The work of operations is meant to bring all of this together. Operations builds and maintains the system and is often the first to know when it is failing, and sometimes the last to be given permission to change it. But operations professionals are also the people closest to the gap between what our organizations say they value and how resources actually flow, who gets served, who gets lost in the process, and who the narrative moves on without.

Every time you slow down enough to notice who the story is moving on without, you are doing something that is both technically sound and theologically faithful.

So let me leave you with this: the girl in Acts 16 had a name, and the story never stops to reveal it. Since the profit ran dry, what became of the girl? What do you think would’ve been the right approach for Paul to take?

- Lana

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