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What is it good for?
From BoF 3
Good God
y’all! Edwin Starr said it all about
war. Now the BoF takes on a far more
serious foe – Learning and Development…
Work is tedious enough. The least
you could expect is to be left alone to sit out the next 40 years of soul
eroding travesty until you can be told your pension fund has bombed and 'death
is the new retirement'. But no. Slowly and insidiously another beast has
emerged to contend with. The harried
employee thinks he has found a way to survive the false faced absurd banality
of the modern workplace. His body has
adapted its sleeping pasterns to enable him to nap on a toilet using the comfort
of a two ply roll as a pillow. His brain
has a store of instantly retrievable explanations for missed deadlines and
blundered statistics. A network of safe
havens has been established throughout the building where he can kill a few hours
flicking an elastic band into a bin. The
theft of our man's life has been rendered neutral by these and other exigencies
of sanity. And can the managerial
inclined automatons who stalk amongst us normal folk accept this behaviour as a
natural part of the deal? Can they hell.
Metaphorically bedecked in monk-esque robes they
nudge you from your stupefied slumber, playing Obe-One to your Anakin, Mr.
Miyagi to your Karate Kid. Proclaiming
themselves to be not just the person who gives you money to avoid destitution
but your spiritual guide they grasp in their enlightened mitt a form headed
with the words: 'Learning and Development'.
Listen to the riches that they promise, note the interest, nay passion,
that they have for your growth not just as an employee, but a person. Then after a month enduring an idiot’s guide
to computer programs you will never use you begin to think Qui Gong might just
have been taking the piss.
Look
at what is on offer. At the lower end of the employment spectrum, a position
which I am highly familiar, managers patronize their workers spectacularly with
offers of CLAITs or ECDLs as the path to self actualization, when they know
that any request for education beyond Microsoft indoctrination would break the
£100 per person budget. Computer
Literacy and Information Technology (I wonder why they added that “and” into
the acronym?) and the European Computer Driving Licence are learning and development’s
Valhalla – cheap, tedious, nothing you couldn’t do yourself and most importantly
utterly uninspiring of independent thought.
As you endure the indignity of being “appraised” once a year there will
be somewhere in the labyrinthine paper mountain a section headed “training
needs”. On being asked what these needs are
the temptation to reply “well, I’ve taken quite an interest in utilitarian
philosophy, but could do with a hand on the finer points of Locke’s view of the
social contract” is strong. And why
not? Because you’ll find that your
employer’s attention is strangely elsewhere when, to break that scale 7 ¾
spinal point barrier, you need to do a degree full time for three years at a
cost of £4000. Funded by yourself. Work
is now claiming a role in your ‘personal development’ but unsurprisingly it draws
the line with a big fat indelible black marker at anything beyond four weeks of
fannying about with fonts in Word. It is
the bullshit factor that infuriates.
So what is the point? Well, so that paperwork is generated to
appease senior management that a) the needs of their workforce are being tended
to and b) that they are being tended in a Jack Nicholson at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest sense. The company can proudly advertise their
benevolence by proclaiming ‘all our staff are ECDL trained! Hoorah!
We are Investors in People’. But
have any of those people used Access, Excel or PowerPoint recently? No, but all our staff are ECDL trained! There is an impressive duplicity involved in
offering the riches of CLAIT, ECDL, NVQ and all their night class buddies as the
grail of personal empowerment when they serve the reverse, moulding you into
the shape of a better admin monkey. Programs like Word exist to express and organize your thoughts not be your thoughts.
Your bosses are
trying to convince you, and by extension themselves, that there is some point to
leaving the house each morning to move money around for strangers when of
course, there isn’t. Other than to make
those strangers even richer than they already are. Learning & Development is an integral
part of the mythmaking of work, constructing the artifice that an office job in
the modern world is both fulfilling and
worthwhile. I don’t need the myth to turn
up every morning. The threat of my house
being repossessed is quite enough. Just
bog off claiming you’re interested in my brain for purposes other than giving
it a good wash.
Take a typical learning and development
experience. While the rigid hierarchical
nature of the workplace has always treated employees as children to be
mistrusted, with Learning and Development you are now literally returned to the
classroom to think long and hard about what you've done. Recently I had to endure a customer care
course at the behest of my employer. This
type of session is much favoured by managers as it costs very little and,
through a patented mulch of selective psychological trickery and bad sandwiches,
teaches obedience, conformity and how to perform a non-invasive lobotomy on
your personality. Let us deconstruct the
day’s schedule, kicking off with, of course…
The Icebreaker – A fun activity setting the tone of the session
The tone being one of sinister
infantalization. Everybody hates the
icebreaker, as press ganged participants give their name, rank and number, then
proceed to humiliate themselves. It is a
bizarre combination of the school room and the interrogation centre as you
think to yourself “I could have sworn I made it past 9 years old, but
apparently not”.
The
icebreaker exemplifies how the people who run these sessions fundamentally
misunderstand the nature of their audience.
Ice is present between work colleagues for good reasons. Should you have the misfortune to find
yourself incarcerated in one of these sessions, make sure the glacial fortress
you’ve steadily constructed to preserve your sanity from the idiots, arseholes
and bullies you’re forced to work with remains intact, regardless of the inane
onslaughts of the ‘balloon game’, the ‘sit down if’ game or the “personal bingo”
game. Even at this introductory stage
Learning and Development shows its true colours. It seeks to demolish the wall between the
private and the public, the ‘you’ at work with the ‘you’ at home. As Alan from finance thrusts his multiple
chins in your direction and you struggle to discern which one of the many flesh
coloured wobbling sacks is the balloon you’re supposed to pluck from his
flaccid under jaw area you realise that never, ever, would you choose to place
yourself in such a monstrous situation.
Should the session you
are attending be a more in depth attempt to scrutinize your proclivity for
dissidence you may find yourself subjected to the horrors of “Personal
Bingo”. Try shaking things up a little
by including, amongst the other giggling conformist tedium of “have you ever taken
a long haul flight” or “stayed late at work more than once this week”, the more
startlingly revelatory “have you ever fucked a goat?” or “did you leave your
wife this week and sleep in your car”.
House!
Even worse is “Fear in
a Hat” where:
Group members write
personal fears anonymously on pieces of paper which are collected. Then
each person randomly selects and reads someone else's fear to the group and
explains how the person might feel. This Fosters interpersonal empathy.
Or, more likely, fosters
deep embarrassment and immanent demotion, especially when the assistant
commissioning change manager revels that he fears his house will burn down and
all his children will die if he doesn’t turn the light switch on and off
seventeen times before leaving for work in the morning.
Happily the course I was subjected to limited
the icebreaker to the minimal introductions.
Unhappily, the person sat next to me announced that the company who had
sent him on the customer care re-programming made him redundant last week. The session’s decent back into the ice age
was hastened by my contribution that I was supposed to be this newly jobless,
possibly newly homeless, person’s manager.
The tense silence, awkward clearing of throats and excessively jovial
haste with which our session leader swiftly moved on exemplify the absurdity of
attempting to break down the barriers between work colleagues. Work and personal information are a noxious
combination leading to frustrations, bitterness, absurd rage and occasionally a
long prison sentence. Learning and
development proclaims the need to examine the innermost workings of your psyche
to enable you to better function at your gurning robotic employment, yet it runs
a mile as soon as someone is foolish enough to divulge their need to dress up
as a baby and shit in a nappy every once in a while. Next time you attend one of these things observe
how the session will be declare itself to be open and challenging yet note how
any challenge is shut down immediately as our instructor moves hastily on, unable
to cope with anything that contradicts their script. But let us hasten along. The sandwiches can’t be far off, can they?
What should the participants expect to get out of the course?
A free lunch, obviously. But, again, this is another over-rated aspect
of learning and development. Much more
satisfying is wandering past poor souls entombed in meeting room 1b and then
planning your assault on the left overs.
Timed right, the wily individual can hoover up two or three dinners
worth of egg and ham sandwiches without having to give five hours of his life away
to the gurus of conformity.
And what’s the benefit for them personally in attending the customer
care workshop
Well, it gets us away from those
feckin customers for a day. But no. The harried employee is often tempted to think
a development session such as this is a good afternoon away from pretending to
be interested in people you despise, or customer service as it is otherwise
known. But this is fallacious. The afternoon is much, much worse for those
simple reasons outlined above; you are here to be conditioned so you no longer
feel loathing for idiots and bullying cretins.
The aim is to feel nothing other than what is outlined in the company
team plan, the appraisal targets and the customer service charter.
Over to you - Participants are invited to share good and poor
examples of customer service they have experienced. Or “I don't care, I just
want my sandwich”
Hoorah, an opportunity to shuffle off
with 3 other people you have no interest in to discuss topics you have even
less interest in and write it all down on a huge piece of paper. While you get out the big marker pen hoping to
recite quickly the same bland drivel that has been paining your ears all
morning, you find that your fellow group members are keen to head off to the
land of rambling shite. As you have
foolishly taken on the burden of the pen bearer you are forced to interpret the
synaptic chaos of mumbling IT man or a babbling Team Leader insistent on a cross
forum best practice scenario interface .
Take the example of a ‘Managing Performance’ session. The tutor wants something along the lines of:
However, the fellowship of bollocks produces:
And what you actually want to write is:
My journey of self-discovery
ended with the revelation that I was not in fact a gobby twat and was more of a
useless mute. Sadly, since the veil of
unknowing was lifted I have not donned shamanic robes to spread the word of the
four. Mainly because pigeon holing
people into broad, bland, definitions is vile and idiotic, serving only to strip
complex human beings down to gurning BIOS systems. As we came to the end of the journey of self
discovery happy groups departed the training room, filled with the knowledge
that their existence is easily comprehensible and they can now smile
contentedly when they serve an abusive arse screaming about his defective
washing machine. Those participants
found with personalities were taken away for surgery.
And
so you have endured the learning and development session. You can return to the comfort of your
favourite toilet cubicle for a nap safe in the knowledge that it will be
another year before you are returned to the classroom of tedious nonsense again. But just a moment. All those earning under £20,000 a year may
continue. However, for anyone who’s
cracked the twenty grand a year barrier I’m afraid the two ply pillow will have
to wait. Earning that amount of cash
means that you are labelled a professional. And for that privilege there looms something
even more soul destroying than the occasional farce of a Learning and Development
session. And it is goes by the acronym,
of course, of CPD.
Continual Professional Development encages the
individual in a permanent Learning and Development session, month after month,
year after year. In some cases, I admit,
this does make sense. A doctor may be in
trouble if he sticks with the dated techniques he or she was taught in medical
school, such as leeches or hammering holes in the head to remove evil spirits. A definition of profession states that:
A profession is an
occupation that requires extensive training and the study and mastery of
specialized knowledge.
Sounds reasonable. But then the question arises “I’m a
Sustainable Development Principle Officer Acting Team Lead. I don’t know what that means and I send
emails all day.” Nevertheless, this is classed as a profession because your
boss says you need Continual Professional Development. It is a self serving, parasitical relationship. This job is important because it is a
profession. How do you know it’s a
profession? Because Continual
Professional Development is required! In
the clamour for survival in the falsely competitive workplace jobs
professionalise themselves with language, constructing a fallacious academic
approach with ultimately renders itself meaningless. All art about art is tedious. Work about work is pointless. Clerical,
Administrative, whisper the evil word: Management? These are not professions. Our specially commissioned scientific research
shows that the decline of meaningful employment inversely correlates with rise
of CPD’s attempt to disguise the pointlessness of working in a service based
economy:
CPD is not applicable to the ‘professions’
that shout the most about its vital importance, those involved in the dull,
routine service and ‘knowledge’ activities that have to pretend that their
existence is compatible with a fully functioning human brain.
“But look”, cry the masses ranks of email
senders and form fillers, “we have a Professional
Association, we must be important”.
Beware the professional organization.
It lurks in the shadows like Opus Dei, it possesses the power of the
funny handshake like the Masons. You
will be having a quite reasonable conversation with someone when they mention
that their article on the role of data input management systems is to be published
in the forthcoming edition of CRAPO (The Chartered
Research Association of Project Officers) Monthly Update. You then realise that you are not talking to
a human being but to a Model 2iia, serial number 4815162342. It’s marginally worse than discovering your
colleague regularly feels the power of Jesus’ love.
CPD quickly mutates into the workplace
equivalent of your next door neighbour’s new car, your squash partner’s watch
or your cousin’s new paved drive. “Dammit,
Susan over there has the edge with FliCdic after her name and 17 chapters in
her portfolio. But Andrew, pah, he’s an
also ran with a mere TosSR and a division three associate membership.” Like the vile, economy boosting lie of a
“property ladder” CPD promotes this growth fetish of “career progression”. Progressing to where? And to what ends? Why must a career
‘progress’? Especially when progression in
these terms means moving from doing something concrete to sending emails and
moving paperwork around i.e. management.
In this way CPD shows itself for what
it really is; a tool of fear. The lack
of subjugation to hours outside work spent putting papers in plastic wallets
means your very life is at risk, or so your boss would have you believe. No CPD equals no promotion, no successful
interview, no career prospects and a life spent muttering in supermarket
doorways at strangers. The workforce is kept
harried and under the thumb, unable to reflect on their absurd situation, the
very thing CPD claims to encourage. It is a little known fact that, due to
length problems, George Orwell had to cut the chapter in 1984 exploring the hypocrisy of the Ministry of Information’s CPD
program. Allegedly.
Workers are asked to question and reflect when every structure in the
institution acted against questioning and reflection.
Worryingly,
organizations exist purely to sell
CPD as a product. Like snake oil
salesmen, they peddle the placebo of standardising the workforce and passing on
the responsibility for managing people to paper forms. Here is an amendment of the guff offered by
one provider:
Global competition is a factor in the lives of
an increasing number of professionals [you’re going to be sacked!] Clients are ever more aware of their rights
and the levels of quality that they demand are continuously rising [that lawsuit
is just around the corner] CPD operates throughout the working life of a
professional [it simply will not stop]
It comes in many guises. [Like Satan] and must be considered
an investment in the total skill base of the workforce [and my bank account] CPD is the catalyst for change the workplace [you
can sack troublemakers!] and can improve the level of competence of
the individual staff members. [Because managers certainly can’t] It is vital that the type of CPD required is
accurately identified. [By us. At great cost.] Individuals must be encouraged to plan their
own CPD programmes [so that they can think
only of work at all times and forget about that doing their job nonsense]
What CPD encourages is the modern disease of abdicated
responsibility. It exemplifies a loss of
trust in the individual and individual leadership by producing a soviet style
blueprint for all behaviour. Brains and
skill are replaced by a portfolio of shite. And it is precisely because it is
so monomaniacally centralised and controlled that it becomes a nullifying and
useless paper-filling exercise about how to fill in paperwork. Learning and development – what is it good
for? Don’t bother getting into groups of
three and discussing it. Edwin can tell
us…
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