Classic Oversteer

When I was twelve or thirteen, my dad taught me how to drive.

The good thing about learning to drive in Nebraska is that there is no traffic to worry about. The bad thing is that your first few times behind the wheel come on gravel roads. For those of you who have never ventured to the great state of Nebraska, the land is flat, the corn is tall and the roads are gravel. That is to say that the driving surface is not paved, but rather is hard packed dirt covered with about an inch of loose sand and gravel. In the American-built, rear-wheel-drive vehicles that most Nebraskans drive, the surface initially feels somewhat like loose packed snow or black ice on a paved highway.

On a fateful Saturday afternoon in June, my Dad and I had just finished pulling a heavy, horsepower-laden engine from an old Ford Mustang and installing it into my Dad’s lightweight, rear-wheel-drive Ford Courier pickup truck. We had worked all day and were pretty proud of ourselves, but it was time to go home. My Dad climbed into our full sized Chevy pickup, and told me to follow him home in the now-supercharged Ford Courier. I couldn’t have been more excited.

About two miles into the trip, I experienced (or more accurately, engaged in) what I like to call “classic oversteer.” The truck started to get away from me a little bit, but I stayed on the gas, determined to fight through. I pulled the wheel to the left to correct my course, and the back end swung out to the right. I pulled the wheel to the right to correct my mistake, and the back end swung even further to the left. Soon I was fishtailing back and forth across the road that I was careening down. Fortunately, the fishtailing only lasted a couple of minutes. Unfortunately, it ended nose down in a culvert at the bottom of the valley. That’s right, I dumped the truck over the steepest bank I could manage to find, and totaled the truck, new engine and all.

I tell this story because learning to drive on gravel is a lot like learning to lead a team in Uganda. You get into the truck excited and ready for the challenge, feeling like a grownup with the new responsibility. You have way more horsepower than you have any business handling. You start down the road, and it is a lot of fun. You get into deep gravel, and get a bit out of shape. You make a few mistakes and you overcorrect for each of them, making even bigger mistakes. If you are not extremely careful, you can find yourself jerking the wheel back and forth, overcorrecting for every misstep, and praying that you don’t run the whole thing into the ditch.

I have an amazingly talented team of twenty-two professionals, including four Americans, one Australian and seventeen Ugandans. We have eight attorneys, four social workers, two investigators, two pastors, six administrative professionals, and me. For some reason, I have been chosen to lead this team in our efforts to bring legal relief to widows and orphans who have had their homes stolen from them by opportunistic thugs, who often happen to be their former in-laws. We receive case referrals from churches, non-profit organizations and our own legal training seminars, hearing horrific stories of defenseless women and children being thrown from their homes in their hour of need by the very people who should be protecting them. We meticulously investigate the facts of the cases to determine if the law has actually been broken. If it has, we represent the victims in legal proceedings, which may include negotiations, mediations and/or civil and crimination litigations, all designed to re-claim the properties that were stolen. And finally, we work to reintegrate the victims by providing for their basic needs for food, shelter, medicine and psychosocial support. The team was doing really well before I got here. In the first five months of 2009, we educated hundreds and hundreds of people on the laws protecting widows and orphans, recovered the homes and property of over 40 victims and secured the arrest of four perpetrators.

I just pray that I can keep this truck moving down the road as I take the wheel. The problem is that my natural tendency in a new situation is to over steer. I come in focusing on praising the team for its accomplishments on Monday, focusing on our shortcomings on Tuesday and back to the hope for tomorrow on Wednesday. I want to be everyone’s friend one day, I feel the need to exert more authority on the next, and on the third day I want to play around again. I want to let people find their own way on Wednesday, I am micromanaging on Thursday and have resolved to strictly “measure by results” again on Friday. Back and forth, left and right, each time feeling the back end of the truck swinging wider and wider.

While this is my tendency, I continue to work, hope and pray that it will not be my destiny. The first step in getting through an oversteer situation is to just relax. The second step is to stop trying so hard to correct your last misstep. Just keep moving down the road and measure your responses to your own failures. Let the horsepower work for you instead of against you. Stop correcting and start driving.
I imagine that as time goes on, I will start to feel a little more relaxed and will be able to stop correcting and start driving. If I can, the horsepower in this office has almost limitless potential, and it is going to be a lot of fine to drive.

P.S. - For those of you who have never driven on gravel, ice or snow, and thus can’t relate, imagine the first time you played Mario Kart, and how you repeatedly drove Yoshi into one wall after another as you frantically searched for the center of the road.

P.P.S. – Mom, I believe I already came clean with you on the truck incident, but if this is your first time hearing the story, sorry I never told you.