Driven to Distraction

Sometimes, the study of semantics is a great deal more revealing than it ought to be, other times, it’s at least an interesting exercise, albeit a mildly philosophical one. Consider a bus-driver: if you asked the next bus-driver you meet to give you his job-title, he would answer “I’m a bus driver.� If you asked him to explain the fundamental, underlying purpose of the job, would he answer “to drive buses?� I don’t think so. I’m willing to bet it would have more to do with “ensuring that my passengers are moved between locations safely and on time.� So whilst the core skill the bus driver exercises is one of bus-driving this is simply a means to the end of transporting passengers efficiently.

In truth, his job title ought to be ‘chronologically focussed geographical repositioning enabler’. Okay, so that sounds silly, and if he actually said that, you’d think he was a freak and move swiftly on, but you understand the point.

The technical skills he has access to are merely a translation tool; without it, he couldn’t achieve the objective or raison d’etre of his work, but on its own, without passengers, the skill is almost completely redundant.

Quite often, we find ourselves over-concentrating on what we do in our work, rather than on what we’re trying to achieve. I don’t doubt that when we stop to think about it, we could all quote a huge list of examples of this unfortunate principle in action; and it might be that, in a bizarre form of mass-hallucination, we might even suffer from this aberration at an organisational level. How many of us have become understandably frustrated at the decision by our board to buy in new software or equipment – often at huge expense – that doesn’t actually solve any problems, or the decision to employ a new person in a role that doesn’t actually need filling, for a purpose that nobody actually cares about?

Alternatively, you could find yourself committing the ultimate form of organisational self-delusion: the hara-kiri of muddled-thinking in fact and turn the principles of the problem completely around and find yourselves so completely zoned in on what it is you’re trying to achieve, that you completely lose sight of the tools and skills that you actually need to make it happen. This is my personal bugbear in my working life and it causes me endless and unrelenting stress. Let me illustrate with an example.

Among our many operational divisions we serve many different needs as a corporate entity. We manage events and conferences, we manage corporate hospitality and we manage employee and customer incentive programmes. We do a whole lot of other stuff too, but the point is, we offer all of these services to our clients. When a member of staff leaves any of these departments, a decision is taken to hire new staff and the hunt is on to find a person with skills and experience of conference or event management, of corporate hospitality, or of incentive management.

What you have therefore, is an effort to fill a position based entirely on what the role needs to achieve. At no point does anyone ever ask, “what skills or tools do we need in place to ensure that the objective is achieved most efficiently?� The enabling aspects of the role are simply not considered. Ultimately, we find ourselves employing someone who is probably great at talking to conference delegates and giving them good directions to the buffet table, but ask them to produce a list of delegates travelling from the Republic of China in a spreadsheet, and they’re stuffed.

With conference logistics, the actual being present at the conference and ensuring it all runs smoothly is literally the tip of the iceberg: and the smoothness of operations is almost entirely dependent upon the preparation. Unfortunately, all our event managers are brilliant at the 10% they need when they arrive at the conference, it’s just the other 90% of the time that they struggle. These people are so intent on delivering their passengers on time that they forgot to learn how to drive the bus too.

Of course, as I highlighted back at the start, it’s just as easy to over-focus on the driving, and this is something that features much more negatively amongst the techies. I have lost count of the times that I’ve been told by a fellow techie (usually the resident computer guru in the client’s organisation) that my code isn’t w3c compliant and it won’t display properly on pre 1956 valve compliant mainframes. Never mind that everyone using the system is tied into IE6 on Windows XP because it’s a corporate extranet; this person is so obsessed with driving that he really doesn’t care about where the bus is going or when it will arrive.

Unfortunately, it is my view, that the world of business is changing in a fundamental way that is causing enormous difficulties for individual workers; you suddenly find that you need to be a good driver and be able to deliver your passengers on time. For someone like me, with excellent driving skills, I’ve had to learn an awful lot about passenger management and because it’s often my driving that people rely on to get where we need to go, I’ve been able to learn about how passengers need to be treated almost through an osmotic process. Unfortunately for others, I believe that if you have the passenger management skills, it’s really quite difficult to learn how to drive, and that’s often evidenced by the sheer number of near-misses, minor prangs and the occasional freeway pile-up that we have to deal with in our day to day.

And let’s not even get started on insurance.