<$BlogRSDUrl$>

Drooling on the Pillow

Thursday, March 03, 2005

Um, Prejudice is Bad, N'Kay? 

Well, that was interesting.

Any situation where a work force is compelled to attend a meeting that is not specifically about some aspect of their work and where an outside firm is contracted to instruct the group on behavior is essentially the same meeting. The outside firm is paid to convert simple, common words into words fraught with special meanings, to make charts and graphs and put them on the wall and in your hands, and to keep you awake.

I include meetings in which information of undeniable value is provided, such as fire safety meetings. I would actually expand it to include meetings where heterogenous groups sign up to be sold a particular bill of goods (Be a Stock Market Genius, Zillions Through Real Estate, and, for the older generation, EST).

Same meeting. Slightly different dynamics, perhaps, different buttons being pushed, but you can call them all Theatre Meetings as in all of them, even if you believe they have intrinsic value, you have to admit there are elements of artifice, magic and mystery and they succeed or fail pretty much on the basis of theatrical values.

I don't know if you would call Theatre Meetings a mature industry, but they have been around awhile and, as in any service, you get what you pay for.

I'm floor fire warden and have to go to a hour long fire safety meeting every year. This meeting was on the low end. Bless his heart, the guy put you in mind of Chris Farley and government cheese. Sweating, stammering, backtracking, occasionally getting completely lost, I found my self asking questions and volunteering to be his stooge just because I felt sorry for him.

If you haven't seen it, go out and rent The Office where Ricky Gervais takes a turn as a motivational speaker in the second season. Much of this brilliant series is almost too painful for anyone who has ever worked in a cubicle to watch. No one can watch that episode without cringing.

The people running the diversity seminar I was at today are high end. These are brisk people, peppy people, smiling, happy people, but also very slick people and intelligent. The lead facilitator was actually quite charming. He was funny when he wanted to be, warm and personable, but he controlled a meeting of close to 200 people. I couldn't.

What did I learn? It's nice to be nice. Communication is good. Don't discriminate.

Just to take the edge off the cynicism, let me say that the issues these meetings are addressing are important and it can't do any harm to get people thinking about them. If someone could come up with a way to actually move these problems from the theatrical to the actual it would undoubtedly be a good thing for us as workers and a good thing for the business. I hope it's not cynical to say they need to keep working on it.
Posted by: Sluggo / 2:10 PM
|
Weblog Commenting and Trackback by HaloScan.com Listed on BlogShares