Well we had our big day! Wow. As you may have known, I was dreading
this horrid exercise. I imagined it largely as a coercive effort. Some
new management trick bought from expensive consultants to beat us into
submission using fear and anger. I could not imaging what they wanted
from us even though they sent out countless emails encouraging us,
informing us, and cajoling us.
I worked hard to figure out what they wanted from this day. Was it
some bizarre effort to create a conformist atmosphere, adopt the
company as country and family, or just a gesture to placate us by
appearing to care about our relationship with the company. What did
they want? I'm a suspicious person when dealing with non-individual
entities. People, individuals, I'm quite willing to take at face value.
But one to one changes nature when you add even one more. The texture
of the relationship changes and it changes even more dramatically when
one of the three represents not themselves but a larger non-existent
entity, like a belief system, a country, a company -- a governing
body, as it were. They enter into a relationship with you that is not
one of choice between two individuals but one that is horribly
lopsided because one individual is not individual, they are
representing a collective. The decisions of the collective, the
mysterious governing body, become the motivations of the person
standing in front of you. Even I think this sounds paranoid.
Twenty years ago, I wrote a poem that included the lines:

I don't believe in no government,
And I don't believe in no god.
I believe the way that it all comes
Down, is a fraud.
-----
I don't want to die, for god or country

Clearly this is not a new anxiety of mine.

All that said, my willingness to be curious and willing got me to work
in time for the start of the second kick-off session. We gathered,
standing (thereby indicating it was going to be a short, fast session)
in the large room used for such gathering (and sports when meetings
are not happening). The lights went down, a screen lit up, and our
CEO's voice boomed out over the loudspeaker. Our CEO is a tiny woman,
small in physical stature only, and she had cleverly started her
speech from the back of the room; while talking into a lapel mic, she
wound her way through the shuffling herd ( which cleared around her
like gazelles scenting lions) speaking.
She, and the two shills in the audience who responded to her call for
contributions of personal commitments, chatted their way through a
fast set up. We were to look for ways to enhance our interactions with
coworkers, make life better for our customers, and thereby improve the
company as a whole. On one level, I understand that if the workers in
a company are all pulling in the same direction (led either by fear or
dedication) the company, as a whole, moves in that direction. Think of
galleys, the ancient sailing vessels with their rows of vassals
pulling on their oars per the direction of the man who took his
direction from above. The sailors were volunteers and the adventure
they sought was facilitated by the need for sailors. Circular, just
like now where a company needs employees to take care of customers
(Max Barry's book Company aside) and those employees are also
customers. It's a very involved relationship one has, especially with
a large corporation.
The first third of my professional life was spent working for small
companies. Then I went out on my own and found it was still small
companies that needed my work. Now, I work for a corporation (in all
senses). It's an international corporation of mind-boggling size (at
least to me). It's employee count, excluding contractors and
consultants, and outsourced departments, is about the population of a
mid-sized city.
Once we were into our breakout sessions, I was faced with the duality
of my own sense and apprehensions about the day (and the motive of the
company). Two coworkers were bantering and one declared this day to be
a colossal waste of resources (money and time, specifically his time)
and he worried that this was how the company was spending his bonus.
The other coworker responded saying he preferred to see it as an
investment the company was making; the company thought so much about
the exercise that they were willing to spend the money. We figured,
just taking the population of the company and the amount of time taken
on this particular day alone, it was costing the company at least
$10,000,000. I think the room, by the time the 15 people had gathered,
were fairly evenly split between resentful, passive, and curious.
The facilitators were all management level employees who had received a
couple of hours of training prior to being assigned a room. The
facilitators, during their training, managed to inject changes into
the structure of the day. First, they reduced the amount of time to be
spent and they eliminated the requirement that employees attend the
session led by their direct supervisor. This changed the outcome
dramatically.
First, people were dispersed and were now working with people with
whom they did not have close working relationships. Second, the goal
changed from a commitment the team would make to a suggestion for a
project to be undertaken to achieve the goal of the day.
The goal of the day was identifying a project that could be
accomplished in a 3 month period that addressed an issue that blocked
the delivery of simplicity. That delivery may be something in-house
that prevented the delivery of product or make the work difficult to
perform. That delivery could be something about our product that made
it difficult to sell, use, or maintain.
We started with identifying some place in our own lives, outside of
work, where we had made things easier for ourselves. We went around
the room and chatted that up. Then we identified some areas on our
work life where things had been made easier (usually by another
employee, it was, at this point, shifting from what have you done for
me lately to what has someone done for you lately). Then, we sat down
with sticky notes and wrote down areas, in our work life, that
presented problems, opportunities for improvement, or created road
blocks to success. Then we worked with one other person and chose two
of the issues from our collections. The selected issues were posted on
a board and we voted on them. We selected one as the focus of our
suggestion.
The discovery and exploration phases were handled with a very six
sigma style of working. The facilitator in my group was very good at
giving us enough leeway to explore our thoughts and feelings without
devolving into a harsh complaint session.
We were all happy to leave the meeting, but we were also satisfied
with our contribution to the day. I think that is what the corporation
was looking for.