This particular online meeting isn’t as awful as some. Like the one five days ago.
There must have been a hundred people on that Microsoft Teams meeting. It was like a rave. Imagine attending an in-person meeting with a hundred other people. You’d lose your mind. Isn’t there a digital fire code that restricts the number of people in one online event? Why isn’t there one?
A big reason for that Microsoft Teams meeting was so that Pete could present his PowerPoint. “Can everyone see my screen?” he kept asking. No. No, Pete, no one can see your screen! Stop asking “Can everyone see my screen?” and do something!
You’ve always associated Pete with acronyms. Five minutes into the meeting, he had already name-dropped the QCR, the UTS and the MMS. The two new employees nodded and scribbled notes, or at least showed scribbling body language. Maybe acronyms, like COVID, are contagious, because Sophie asked, “Pete, did your team take into account the increased pressure, which is only going to get worse in my opinion, from the QTPs?”
“We’re on that,” Pete said, “and even better, it’s NKO-compliant. Did everyone get my deck?” Ninety-eight heads nodded, and two faces froze as their owners desperately flipped through their inboxes to find the deck in an unopened email. Two people asked if Pete would resend the deck, and two others chimed in with “I never got it” and “I don’t think I was on the distribution list.”
As Pete began his presentation, everyone in the room settled in for a tedious ride. One of your colleagues yawned with his mouth closed -- a trick he once told you he mastered in business school and has refined over the years. Everything went as expected until the moment Larry appeared online. Larry is Pete’s boss. His appearance seemed to unnerve Pete, who began winding his way backward to his first few PowerPoint slides, weaving in the feedback he’d received from others in the room to ensure that Larry appreciated the multitude of angles Pete stole from his colleagues and now claimed as his own. At least everyone now knew that Pete was a virtual asshole.
He was also a petrified virtual asshole. “Pete, you’re frozen,” someone said, and it was true: Pete’s motionless face was a snapshot of torment, like a Gustave Doré illustration from Dante’s Inferno. When he came back to life he asked, “So what does everyone think?” A few seconds passed. “Can you repeat that, please?” someone finally asked. “You were frozen.”
It’s hardly the only online glitch you’ve experienced during an online meeting. It’s not as bad as the colleague who turned on her screen share, giving everyone a close-up of a desktop folder entitled DIVORCE. Then there was the time Sheri was interrupted by a little boy asking, “Where is my penis?” “Sorry, everyone,” Sheri said, but when she turned to her son, her knee banged up against her desk, sending her laptop flying and shattering a lamp. Of course there was also Becky’s boyfriend whose figure you once detected slithering across the floor so as to avoid the beam of her laptop camera.
A few minutes later, the meeting came to an end, though nine points remained on the agenda. The fact of the matter is, someone will have to schedule another meeting. Meanwhile, your colleagues were saying goodbye and waving like the Trapp Family Singers -- since when does anybody wave when they leave a meeting? The funniest part is they’ll all see one another in five minutes at the next meeting, this one on WebEx, or is it Google Hangouts? You’d hoped for an elegant farewell -- as if romantic music were swelling and movie credits were scrolling -- but instead you see the LEAVE MEETING icon. Reluctantly you press it. Are you sure you want to leave this meeting” the box asks. “No, of course not!” you feel like shouting. “You saw through me, you bastard! I want to die here!” “We got a lot accomplished, and I look forward to the next time,” someone was saying, but the room was empty, an abandoned dance floor.
You’ll see everybody fourteen more times this week, no wait, fifteen, thanks to the Friday night Zoom cocktail hour (your boss, worried company culture was taking a hit during the pandemic, sent everyone an invite, with kids and pets welcome). You would rather get drunk alone with your cat, but it’s not like you have a choice anymore. The thing about doing everything from home is that none of your usual excuses work.
Does any of this seem familiar?
No. Sorry, Martin, but none of that seems familiar to me. At least not in the way you tell it or seem to react to it. This book is full of little (funny?) anecdotes like this, placed there, I think, to demonstrate how little “common sense” exists in our corporate environments. You know. Common Sense. The thing everyone has and can agree on.
To solve problems like this, Martin recommends setting up within every company a “Ministry of Common Sense” -- a dedicated person, team, or department whose job it is “systematically vacuum up the lack of common sense in your company and replace it with simple, intuitive solutions that eliminate confusion and impracticality from the lives of both employees and customers.”
“Customers” is actually a key insight, because somewhere else in the book Martin reveals a practical tactic that actually has value.
This is a core reason why I bring employees together with customers in consumers’ homes whenever I start working with a company. For the first time, employees are given an opportunity to see the world from the outside in, as their customers see it, instead of seeing the world from the inside out. If your company sells products or services, doesn’t it make sense to figure out who your customers are and what they want?
Hmmm. Outside In. Seems like I’ve heard that somewhere before. Oh yeah, I read a whole book about that and it actually had that title. That, to me at least, is the essential concept that Martin’s book is really trying to teach. Run your company from the outside in, not the inside out, meaning that your activities and procedures are structured in the way that makes life easier for your customers. And once you understand who your internal customers are, the same concept can be used to structure connections between people, teams, or departments within your company, too.
But maybe that idea was already taken, so Martin had to create the extra layer and call it the Ministry of Common Sense. Or maybe he actually thought his little anecdotes about his little frustrations with corporate dysfunction would be entertaining.
I was in Miami a couple of years ago for a conference, staying at a hotel. Wanting to check the day’s headlines, I reached for the TV remote. It was remarkably complex. It looked like it could launch a rocket ship, actually. Infinite tiny numbers. A multitude of buttons. Three separate numerical keypads. Where was the ON button? Was it the red one labeled “On?” Wait -- why were there two red ON buttons? If I pressed both, would my TV be incredibly on, allowing me to access supernatural programming that viewers with just one ON button couldn’t? What did “Source” mean? What did “a-b-c-d” mean? What did all the arrows signify? After stabbing indiscriminately at the thing for a few minutes, the TV finally came to life. I watched the news for a few minutes, then shut the TV off, or tried to. There were two OFF buttons. When I pressed the first one, the lights in the room dimmed in a moody, sexy way. When I pressed the second OFF button, the air conditioner shut off. The TV stayed on. I ended up climbing up onto a nearby desk and, with my butt in the air, yanking the plugs from the wall socket, disconnecting the TV, the minibar, and the standing lamp.
Because, here’s the thing. Not every “problem” is indicative of corporate dysfunction -- although Martin will go on at length to describe how his encounter with the hotel remote certainly was one. Some “problems” are the picayune complaints of the uninformed. After all, some of us actually know what the “Source” button on a TV remote is for. So to ascribe everything that frustrates you as a result of someone else lacking common sense is actually not as useful as one might think it would be.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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