At the start of all the courses I've been on recently, there's a little ceremony where the trainer(s) ask us "what we want the rules to be" for the duration of the course. There's a moment's silence and then someone says something fairly applie-pie-ish. The rules have turned out to be fairly consistent:
Confidentiality: what is said on the course, stays on the course. These are not prescriptive courses - for complicated reasons to do with institutional denial, The Bank can't do prescriptive courses - but rather ones where we're presented with some ideas and invited to discuss what various concepts mean to us and what we think of this or that fairly simple case study. (It's a lot like Teacher Training, and for the same reasons. I feel another article coming on.) The value of these courses is what you learn about yourself and the benefit of that is the out-loud admission of your faults and revelations. A lot of frustration, confusion and a little hurt gets expressed in these sessions. If we thought any of that would get back to the Bosses, the sessions would be useless.
No Mobiles: no comment needed.
Let everyone have their say - no talking over people: people like me need to be reminded not to do that. It's a really bad habit I have.
Honesty: within reason, of course. What this partly means is that people must not say "I've never done that" or "That doesn't happen here" or "Of course I do that all the time". Not so much dishonesty as what the psychologists call faking good. The other part of what it means is that everyone has to share a little: no sitting there saying nothing.
No deferring to the senior guy. Ever noticed how everyone in the room shuts up and does deferential listening body language when a Senior Person makes a contribution? Even if you didn't know they were a Senior Person, they minute they start talking, you know it: there's the quietly confident body language, the measured tone that doesn't expect to be interrupted, the measured, placatory, ambiguous language and the sense that they are delivering a message, not speaking from the heart or soul. The training people advertise the grades who are eligible for the course so this doesn't happen. But when it's an open-grade event, the deferring happens.
No apple-pie and no jargon. This is mine and I'm horrified at how few people know what "apple pie" means in this context, or for that matter, what "drinking the Kool Aid" means. How can you identify the action if you don't have the concept? Apple pie, if you don't know, comes from a 1950's phrase: Mom, the flag and apple pie, three things no-one is going to find fault with. It means anything that is uncontroversial, unarguable, received wisdom and hence bland. Drinking the Kool Aid is what you do when you decide to go along with the prevailing or required beliefs - with the suggestion that it's a little bit cultish, uncritical and yet that one's acceptance is slightly ironic. I'm asking that the participants don't hide behind platitudes - as one woman did when asked for her action at the end of the Resilience course: "well, it's about making time for me, really" she said. Apple pie.
I liked the guy who said that he wasn't keen on profanity. Everyone at The Bank is far to well-behaved to be profane of speech, but it did perk the debate up a notch. He was a nice guy as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment