Hell by Michael Smith

Today’s one of those team-building exercises, you know the sort. Sales are down, management wants to raise morale (and hence production (and hence profits)), so we’re all here to waste a day, listening to a team of consultants (hired at great expense, no doubt) impart some modern thinking upon us, “injecting cutting edge vitality”, I think they said.

Following the inevitably tedious icebreaker activity, we’ve all just participated, without enthusiasm, in a quick psychological profile assessment. We were asked to complete, as honestly as possible, the following sentence, “If my home was on fire, the first thing I would grab would be …” Following the expected responses containing such items as relatives, pets, and precious possessions, I don’t think people were too impressed when I suggested, “… a fire extinguisher.” I wasn’t being flippant, just supplying the requested honesty.

Now, to conclude the session, we’ve been given ten minutes to write a short, individual piece describing our vision of Hell.

No doubt, when we report back to ‘share’ our thoughts, the various visions of hell will include plenty of fire, brimstone and torture, each scenario straight out of some cheap, horror B-movie. However, I’ve decided to take a different route, and will describe a version of Hell that can be found anywhere, anytime, all over the world.

This is what I’ve written…

My vision of Hell is being trapped in a corporate meeting. Let me describe it to you. Some of you may even recognize some, or all, of what I have written.

To begin with, you might think the agenda for such an evil meeting would contain an infinity of items; not so. An infinite number of items would imply variety and interest (something we are keen to avoid in our hellish meeting). No, our agenda will have just four points.

1. Apologies (Basically, everyone who has gone to heaven.)
2. Main item. (For a truly fiendish agenda there should be just one main point, and so tedious in nature that there exists no hope of ever moving on.)
3. Fun item. (It doesn’t matter what this is, it will never be reached.)
4. Any other business. (Does Hell have any other business?)

The official timepiece for such a meeting will be, of course, a Schrödinger Clock, a fiendish device that both moves and does not move, depending on whether or not it is being observed. Its main characteristic, however, is that it always indicates there are 47 minutes remaining before the meeting’s official closing time.

As for the attendees, it would not be necessary for there to be a vast number of people present. What is essential for a truly tedious meeting is a core of people who love the sound of their own voices, think what they have to say is relevant, and pepper each monologue with personal anecdotes, incomprehensible to almost everyone else present. Here, the old eighty-twenty rule would work well, that is, eighty percent of the talking is done by twenty percent of the people. And eighty percent of the people have no interest whatsoever in the views of the other twenty percent.

Of those attending the meeting, a few will be wearing T-shirts bearing the legend, ‘This could all have been done in a single email’, which will only add to the desperate futility of the entire venture.

It is also vital that at no stage of the meeting is any actual decision made. Just cycle through: Introduction – Laying out the pertinent facts – Summarizing alternative views – Recapping the main points. These should all be included in an endless, cyclical discussion, without any actual decisions being made (as that would give the meeting purpose, something to be avoided at all costs).

The meeting should be led by a team of people, rather than by an individual, and each should enthusiastically introduce the next presenter as they hand over the only microphone available. Each presenter will wear (in addition to a hand-written name tag) an excited grin, and display unbroken childlike enthusiasm for the topic in hand.

There will, of course, be the ubiquitous Powerpoint presentation, the contents of which will have been created in one of two ways. Either, each slide will be written in font size 11, contain no images, and be read out loud in a dull monotone, or, each slide will contain just three bullet-pointed words (preferably beginning with the same letter), each sufficiently enigmatic to be totally meaningless. For example, only the presenter will understand ‘Context – Competence – Confidence’.

And, the presenters may have attempted to introduce some levity into the presentation by the random application of a wide range of slide transitions: blinds, checkerboard, peek, split, fade, wheel, bounce, and, of course, the ever popular spiral. But these gimmicks will soon lose their appeal to all but the presenters themselves.

Finally, the content of this dull monologue will contain much meeting-speak, a language spoken by few but heard by many, a language designed to give enigmatic kudos and gravitas to the presenter, yet remain totally unintelligible to those present.

For example, I could summarize this treatise as follows: in presenting this outside-the-box thinking to you, I hope I have enabled you to experience a tangible paradigm shift, enabling you to grasp purposefully at the low-hanging fruit offered to us through the shared core value synergy of our cross-functional teams, that, through a strategic alignment, will facilitate a plethora of visionary actionable intelligence, and, in the fullness of time, will prove demonstrably to be a real game changer. Thank you.

Michael Smith

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay – Four man fist bump over the top of a meeting table.