system of a down

Tonight: the nature of large organisations, bureaucracy, human interactions in meetings. A soft target, well I suppose so. But when I'm in meetings I can't help drifting into reflections about all these things. There must be a better way of doing...stuff. And this might help set the scene for Wednesday's mentoring.

First, how resources are devoted to issues. At today's meeting we got a report on what various governments are doing about innovation. Principally, they are (a) trying to define it and (b) measure it. You'd reckon defining it would be at least fairly simple, but not so. The NZers have been at it for two years. So what would be the process for someone to say "enough! this (produces napkin with words scrawled in between the crumbs and red wine stains) will be our definition!" And everyone else would go "eureka", or words to that effect, and off we'd go to (b) start measuring it.

However, for some reason everyone's been buggerising around for years on (a). Now, it appears, there will be a coordinated effort to define innovation. I suspect this will mean even more resources being thrown at the task.

Now, a bit of competition might bring some, er, urgency to the job, eh? Give everyone six months, then you get together, the best definition wins? Is that too simple? It seems there's some confusion between competition and duplication, and duplication is winning, hands down. Let's check back in five years and see how we're doing, that's not too optimistic, eh?

Now, meetings. As usual, you'll get the noisy ones and those who just sit back and fall asleeplap it in. At today's effort, I was quite struck by the passion which some people displayed for some issues. That's great, but we all come from individual perspectives and the really hard thing is to understand a perspective that's not your own. That doesn't mean you have to agree with it, change your position or whatever, but there's rarely only one simple answer.

I think these situations often play out with the noisy/passionate ones ruling at the time, and the others come in later and restore some balance/destabilise or wreck the process.

Today's meeting is a relatively new one for me as my little unit has been moved sideways in the larger organisation. So I should be all senses on alert to pick up the currents, the things unsaid, the culture. That took all of one meeting, now I'm wondering 'why are all meetings like this'? You come in full of anticipation, but as soon as the meeting starts, a kind of mental curtain comes down. Except for the really passionate ones, they seem to keep going.

I'm sure there 's plenty of academic analysis of the forces at work in meetings - certainly I've read the literature on how to make meetings go well, so a little practising what I preach would go over well.

And coffee and muffins, of course.