Cro Magnum Team Building
A trip to any good natural history museum will show that in the early days mankind was not a hard club to join, and in fact, there were many tribes, factions, groups, and what you might call neighborhood social clubs vying to be the head dog for all of subsequent history.
If you believe that sort of thing.
You can see them behind the glass panels that separate you, the museum visitor, from various representatives of these tribes, posed by the diorama professional into family groupings going about everyday life.
These scenes have a certain sameness, with womanhood represented a bit off to one side, babies in arm, perhaps treating hides or sorting grains, and the men close in to an outdoor fire, with the day’s kill off to one side ready for cooking, or perhaps he is sharpening an arrowhead, or is in the process of discovering speech or indeed, fire itself.
Nice! Perfectly nice!
They seem like lovely people, and while you would not file the man under the category of classically handsome, there is a rugged determination to his lowered brow that reminds you of your own and tells you you wouldn’t mind car pooling with him or playing cards together or wandering over for a weekend barbecue. Well, and women always look great in furs.
The trick in these circumstances is to be on the right side of the glass, in other words to be the non-extinct species looking in on another that has been swallowed up by time.
It invariably raises the question, why them and not me?
How did they draw the short straw when it came to moving the clan forward through the centuries while others slid past common predators, natural disasters, and the many other risks that attend simply living on this planet?
A lot of our best people in the field put it down to corporate practices, particularly those out of the Human Resources Department.
You know how it is. A society gets to a certain stage of development and right alongside the hunting parties and primitive child-rearing and fire-inventing, entrepreneurial energy emerges.
Small companies form, and then larger ones. The corporate style of business organization cannot be far behind, and where you have a corporation you have best practices and procedures, a reporting structure, organization into functions, and, as mentioned, a Human Resources Department.
You can see where this is going.
With the issuance of the first memo to all employees concerning Dress Down Fridays the stage has been set for the inevitable slide into species disaster.
Take team-building exercises.
The fine people in Personnel can no more resist team-building exercises than a sabertooth tiger can resist devouring a clan or two of pre-human individuals over the slow hours of mid-afternoon to tide him over from lunch to supper.
It isn’t clear why this is so. Anthropologists have long puzzled over the mystery.
True enough, many people within a company are not boon companions, and all in all would be glad to see this or that fellow wander into a nest of poisonous snakes while strolling in the dark looking for wildebeests, but they are all getting paid, something easily pointed out when you threaten to cut off the spigot if they can’t all get along, and the work seems to get done, no matter the personal bruising and bashing that takes place along the way.
But this isn’t good enough to count as best practices in the field. Now people, or pre-people — again, if you believe in that sort of thing — have to more or less be wafted along the hallways in a glowing current of mutual regard. Only then can the company operate at its potential.
Perhaps.
Regardless, the Human Resources Department decides rather than let situations arise where people must trust one another or die and see where the chips fall, they feel compelled to engineer situations that place people in those positions as a matter of stagecraft.
Say there is a trust exercise which involves the team providing support for this one fellow who runs straight for a roaring river with nothing but a line of teammates holding hands between him and the watery doom that awaits him.
He is confident — Human Resources has told him to be confident! — that his teammates, instructed in the virtues of teamwork, will be there to gather him in and prevent his demise. They make a show of fiercely holding hands. They radiate nurture and protection.
Well, we have said – and this is further explained in the footnotes – not everybody gets along. Not really.
This fellow who has been talked into running headlong towards a roaring river full of raging waters and dangerous boulders and what not, to take an instance, is not everyone’s cup of tea.
In fact, the guys in the Upper Lower West Northeast Region consider him a snake in the grass — can’t stand him! — and if you want to know the truth, even his day-to-day colleagues take pains to not meet him after work for a drink.
He just goes on and on at these occasions! Whatever it is he is wound about these days. Whatever in the world it is he is wound up about these days, good God. On and on. It’s just easier to avoid him.
Well, I can think of one thing easier still.
That is to simply loosen hands and part right at that point in the line where he is headed and let him plunge headfirst with a puzzled Neanderthal look on his face directly into this roaring river we have been talking about, completely unimpeded by any Trust Line or the like.
One pain in the neck gone.
This clears out the org chart and makes room for advancement from below.
The humans resources guys go, “no, no, no, you were supposed to catch him.” They go through the slides again, showing illustrations of people helpfully catching other people as they fling themselves towards this river, and say, “Let’s try it again.”
So they try it again.
Next up comes this fellow who out and out steals the best stuff out of the refrigerator in the break room. Makes no pretense of subterfuge! Just takes it!
And…splash.
Then there’s the fellow who, I swear, jams the paper in the copy machine almost each time he uses it, looks around carefully to see if anyone has noticed, then gathers his originals… and just walks away.
So, another big splash.
In some ways, you know, Neanderthal man is rather easily led. The spot in the human brain for memory is not quite developed yet, again if you buy into that sort of thing, and the whole trust exercise thing comes into their brains — each time! — like something brand new.
And so another fellow dashes towards the river with the happy sight in front of him of his colleagues tightly holding hands to save him from his fate. Which they don’t actually do.
It is too painful to reenact the next few days with simple words on the page, suffice to say that by the end of this week-long training period, or seminar you might call it, every male member of the tribe has taken his place and run directly towards this fabulously dangerous river I’ve been going on about, and run straight through the suddenly unlinked arms of his colleagues, however few there are left.
The last fellow, intent on completing the exercise in its entirety and hopeful that his energy and determination will receive high marks on his next performance review, simply runs across the now-empty field and flings himself into the river. It is very straightforward at this point.
The women roll their eyes.
Attrition at this rate takes a toll on any organization, and so it does here. It becomes progressively harder to fill key positions, and at some point the women wander off, looking for a tribe composed of smarter pre-humans. Again, if you etc.
It is the kind of thing that makes any corporate employee who in fact does have two brain cells to rub together say to himself, “I just don’t like the way this is going. I’m going to go ahead and go extinct.”
And who’s to say he doesn’t have something there?
These practices, as bizarre as any head-shrinking or moon-worshiping ritual unearthed by modern archeologists, had more to do with removing early humanity from the face of the earth than any volcano or climate disruption.
And if trust exercises didn’t do it, then the Expense Account Reporting Practices and Procedures Manual finished off the rest.
