It's very pleasing to see that the title of this blog didn't put you off reading it.
The management courses of the 1990s won't have told you what this blog will.
If you think it said "Opportunity is no where", please leave now as you are probably very pessimistic.
You're still reading? That suggests you saw "Opportunity is now here." You must be a true optimist.
However if you saw "Opportunity I Snow here" then I imagine that you are a drifter!
The management courses of the 1990s were, I think, a precursor to the problems that we are now experiencing in the economy and the climate. For those of you that don't know what I am referring to, Google "Team building events" and look at some of the half a billion results.
The rationale was quite simple: Send away your middle management team for a weekend and watch them go through Tuckman's stages of group development. I remember a couple of courses that I went on. These did no more than expose the inherit problems of a group of individuals in a contrived environment. The high performers - modesty prevents me from disclosing if I was one of them - did what they do, whilst the dead wood did what they do. If anything, this type of weekend acted as an accelerator of a groups destruction by causing minor cracks to become major fissures.
If you watch "The Apprentice" then that is a little bit what it was like. Except no-one got fired during the weekend (even though some behaviour was so questionable that I imagine that certain people came under greater scrutiny on their return to work).
At the end of the weekend we were told that we had worked within a environment that isn't the same as our work environment. We never made rafts from planks and oil drums where I worked so it's a good job they pointed that out to us. One has to assume that raft builders are the best managers and don't require any further team development skills. Perhaps they should be running the big companies.
Anyway, I digress. The point I wish to make is that enforced activities such as team building exercises serve no purpose other than to try to get people in teams to lose some of their inhibitions, thus freeing up their creativity.
What our economy has got at the moment is creativity incontinence. Creativity is spewing out of every pore in such a way that we have an economy that is so dynamic that to solve it's problems is like trying to nail jelly to the ceiling. With rubber nails.
The best thing that we could do is to stop asking adult workers to be more and more creative and, instead, to deliver a period of stability that will allow the choppy waters to subside. This is being called for by some areas of my profession (teaching). It will allow for a period of reflection to occur so that problems can be identified and then fully addressed. You can't fix a leaking roof by patching up the leak with a tile that you have taken off another part of your roof.
It is interesting to see that one of the Team building companies that I worked with in the 1990s is now working solely with schools. These activities are meant for the young. To think that they will successfully work for adults is nonsensical. It's like enforced fun. People have inhibitions that stop them from making stupid mistakes at work. The last thing we want is to be encouraging good workers to "free up their minds" to approach things creatively. They will have radical suggestions that will not work in the long term purely because their ideas will be implemented later. By then, other changes will also be implemented making their solution outdated.
Our economy is linked to our climate. Technology requires energy which produces Carbon Dioxide. We have tinkered with our world so much that climate change is occuring. Little changes here and there show the butterfly effect in action. Our desire to be creative has produced the Industrial revolution and the technical revolution. Both of these have resulted in a change to our world and our climate.
However, If we do cause a huge flood, at least I'll be able to make a raft.
The management courses of the 1990s won't have told you what this blog will.
If you think it said "Opportunity is no where", please leave now as you are probably very pessimistic.
You're still reading? That suggests you saw "Opportunity is now here." You must be a true optimist.
However if you saw "Opportunity I Snow here" then I imagine that you are a drifter!
The management courses of the 1990s were, I think, a precursor to the problems that we are now experiencing in the economy and the climate. For those of you that don't know what I am referring to, Google "Team building events" and look at some of the half a billion results.
The rationale was quite simple: Send away your middle management team for a weekend and watch them go through Tuckman's stages of group development. I remember a couple of courses that I went on. These did no more than expose the inherit problems of a group of individuals in a contrived environment. The high performers - modesty prevents me from disclosing if I was one of them - did what they do, whilst the dead wood did what they do. If anything, this type of weekend acted as an accelerator of a groups destruction by causing minor cracks to become major fissures.
If you watch "The Apprentice" then that is a little bit what it was like. Except no-one got fired during the weekend (even though some behaviour was so questionable that I imagine that certain people came under greater scrutiny on their return to work).
At the end of the weekend we were told that we had worked within a environment that isn't the same as our work environment. We never made rafts from planks and oil drums where I worked so it's a good job they pointed that out to us. One has to assume that raft builders are the best managers and don't require any further team development skills. Perhaps they should be running the big companies.
Anyway, I digress. The point I wish to make is that enforced activities such as team building exercises serve no purpose other than to try to get people in teams to lose some of their inhibitions, thus freeing up their creativity.
What our economy has got at the moment is creativity incontinence. Creativity is spewing out of every pore in such a way that we have an economy that is so dynamic that to solve it's problems is like trying to nail jelly to the ceiling. With rubber nails.
The best thing that we could do is to stop asking adult workers to be more and more creative and, instead, to deliver a period of stability that will allow the choppy waters to subside. This is being called for by some areas of my profession (teaching). It will allow for a period of reflection to occur so that problems can be identified and then fully addressed. You can't fix a leaking roof by patching up the leak with a tile that you have taken off another part of your roof.
It is interesting to see that one of the Team building companies that I worked with in the 1990s is now working solely with schools. These activities are meant for the young. To think that they will successfully work for adults is nonsensical. It's like enforced fun. People have inhibitions that stop them from making stupid mistakes at work. The last thing we want is to be encouraging good workers to "free up their minds" to approach things creatively. They will have radical suggestions that will not work in the long term purely because their ideas will be implemented later. By then, other changes will also be implemented making their solution outdated.
Our economy is linked to our climate. Technology requires energy which produces Carbon Dioxide. We have tinkered with our world so much that climate change is occuring. Little changes here and there show the butterfly effect in action. Our desire to be creative has produced the Industrial revolution and the technical revolution. Both of these have resulted in a change to our world and our climate.
However, If we do cause a huge flood, at least I'll be able to make a raft.
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