The Choluteca Bridge Incident: Lessons on acceptance and change

The Choluteca Bridge

Honduras experiences a lot of significant storms, rainfall and associated flooding. Historically, this has damaged a lot of infrastructure in the country, including bridges and transport routes.

Given this context, the Honduran government decided that, for a key bridge over the Choluteca river, it would be worth investing in excellent design and construction so as to create a nearly in-destructible bridge. They commissioned the Japanese company Hazama Ando to build the bridge, and it was completed in 1998.

Later that year, Hurricane Mitch struck Honduras, resulting in huge flooding and damage. The new bridge survived and was nearly undamaged.

When things settled down, though, it became clear that not only had the roads either side of the bridge been destroyed, but the river itself had burst its banks and carved a new bed for itself.

The result was a lovely bridge, over no river, connected to nothing.

The Spanish language youtube video below has some nice images of it.

Why do we care?

There are lessons in this for many of us.

If we hold out positions too strongly, we may find they do not serve us well, particularly if the world around us changes.

At times, being adaptive and flexible, changing in response to the world is the best thing to do in life for ourselves, and for others.

As people, doing so can help our wellbeing and mental health and improve our relationships. For organziations, adapting as the world around us changes can be essential for our ongoing success and survival.

Learning More

Personal growth and change are important in work and in wider life. A lot of this starts with self awareness. We quite like the Bridges model as a tool in this space.

So, the way we use this is to tell people the story of the bridge and then ask them what they take away from the story in terms of reflections / insights for themselves or their organisation.

We think it’s a lovely little provocation to bring the concept of flexibility and adaptability to live for people, it’s something they can really connect with. The nice visuals help as well.

From our perspective, being able to hold your beliefs and positions lightly and respond as the world around you changes is a great thing to do. Both from an operational perspective and a personal perspective. Sometimes being resolute and indestructible is great, but sometimes it leaves you alone in the wrong field, looking a bit silly. Perhaps the real challenge comes in knowing which times are the right times to flex.