Bubble World: Part One

I'm back home from my executive training at Queen's. Here are some notes I sent myself over the first week. They evince a growing measure of resistance, pique, discontent:

Sunday, February 9

The program started at two o'clock in the afternoon. The objective of the day was to get to know one another a bit.

I got teamed up with four other people: three men and one woman. The men are a military doctor, a Director in the federal food safety program, a Director for MNR stationed in Sault St Marie, and the woman is a Director with the provincial gaming commission.

These were all pretty impressive people - the doctor served in Kandahar and told a story of a harrowing helicopter crash he and his team had to pick up the pieces from; the MNR director is 100% a resource management guy; the food agency director is pretty high energy and really achievement oriented; the provincial gaming commission director is focused, tough, responsible and a marshmallow all wrapped up in one.

Every one of us is successful and in a loving relationship that keeps us happy. All of my teammates have kids and are very proud of them. I know all of these things - and others - because of the exercises we did on Day One. We introduced ourselves by speaking in turn on a number of increasingly personal topics sitting knee to knee in circles of five. Then we did an exercise called "bombardment" where we first listed things we felt we'd been successful at. Then we each recounted these in turn to our group and then each member of the group kneeled in front of us and put stickers with words describing us on a bullseye target we held in our laps.

The kneeling got a strong reaction. At least one class member was really not comfortable with the kneeling. Another group of people said some of them knelt and some didn't. Everyone in my group did.

Monday, February 10

We spent the first full day in class. We're ranged along the tiers of an internal room that is also below stairs. So no windows. No sounds of the outside world. Bill - the program lead - presented his quite dated-seeming version of what public policy is, how it works and how public servants move through their careers. Then Hugh Segal, of whom I am a big fan, gave a long and maundering rant about the good old days and how much it sucks to be us.

After lunch was Nick Nanos, the first of two number crunchers good at revealing patterns in peoples' thought and behaviour but less gifted at telling us what these patterns might mean.

After supper, we listened to David Foot, another guy who reveals interesting signals in the numbers but doesn't have enough stuff left over to say what it all means.

Tuesday, February 11

After a long day of multiple harangues on national security and a rapid-fire overview of Canada/US relations by a maniac in a bow tie, Janice Gross Stein came to talk with us about speaking truth to power using her book on Kandahar as a starting point.

When several federal staffers described how the long standing, poor relationship between the politicians and the bureaucrats in Ottawa had the effect of deteriorating the quality of advice given, I put up my hand and invoked the example of the cancelled power plants in Ontario to make the point that there are times where the bureaucrats are clearly providing good advice and the political staff are just as clearly ignoring it.

That's when one of the other students went off her coconut. She turned to me, pointed her finger at me and scolded me for apparently not appreciating the fact that those catastrophically capricious decisions are fully legit. Well, it wasn't my point that they weren't so it's just telling that that's where her head went.

Not sure where the class is going to be after two weeks of this. Glad to see I haven't lost my special power of getting fully, deeply and unwittingly under people's fingernails.

Wednesday, February 12

It's been clear since the very first day that Bill's network is a bit past its best before date, for example Hugh Segal - a lion of another age. But Wednesday's after-dinner speaker was only technically a living fossil. Michael Hart was his name. He's one of those highly opinionated right wing free market fundamentalists, which is fine, who values no opinon but his own, which is less fine.

It was bad enough to sit through his version of the gospel of Adam Smith but after the break under the grotesque title of "evidence-based policy", he broke into a climate change denier riff. It was late and I was tired so I rose to the bait. Everyone said they found it very amusing but I'm thinking that sitting through crap like that is not what the province of Ontario paid for when they signed me up for the course. 

Thursday, February 13

My only note to myself was to make me remember to be sure to take a photo of a hand-drawn sign on the front door of a house on Johnson Street:

Friday, February 14

I sent myself two notes. This one in the morning:

I understand the thesis. Things are not as they should be for the public service and we know this to be true because of the way things were before. But the way things were before was because of a vast range of conditions and variables some we are aware of and understand, some we're aware of but don't understand and a whole bunch of other important things that we are not aware of at all.

Thinking about the good old days doesn't do a damn thing to tell us about what we should do now. We need to do a contemporary real time diagnostic of the situation to see what we might do about this. And, sadly, I guess that's what we won't ever have the luxury of time to do.

If we can't do a real time diagnostic can we please also not talk about the good old days.

I sent this one just before I went to bed:

While travelling to the movie American Hustle, two other course members and I talked about the program.

Several things I had not been admitting to myself came into focus. The course is not that great. The relentless lecture format fails to acknowledge and makes very poor use of the expertise in the room. The lectures are uneven. All try to squeeze too much into the time available. Some have been very poor. And we paid a lot of money for this. And we've taken two weeks away from our homes and our jobs. 

This doesn't feel like executive training. It feels like undergrad.

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So, readers, things are looking bad for our protagonist at the end of Week One.

How did Week Two go? Did they ever stop whining about the good old days? Did a speaker under the age of sixty ever show up?

Come back next week for the thrilling conclusion to Bubble World! 

Thanks for reading! You can find Molly's latest post here.

And have a great week!

Karen