Class Reunion

Fall colours: the Brickworks, Don River Valley, October 14, 2018

Against all odds, I went to a law school reunion last night. It's been 25 years since the class of '93 threw off the shackles of being indentured students and took on the shackles of practicing law.

But that's not the reason I went. 

There were probably parts of law school that I enjoyed, but, for a long time after, those were not the parts I recalled. I remembered being alienated, appalled and annoyed by law school and, by association, a lot of the people I went to law school with. 

Everyone whose company I enjoyed at law school, and who still lives in Toronto, I've continued to see. So I never saw reunions as a thing I needed to do.

But, this time, people whose company I enjoyed and who had moved away from Toronto were making the trek for the 25th year reunion. 

So I put on a new dress, a 100% sequinned jacket and a punishing pair of heels. Bruce, sporting an eye patch because of the wear and tear on his poor old eyeball, came and got me after work on Friday. We walked across Queen's Park to the law building on the University of Toronto campus.

It was a good party, even though the food circulating on trays set new standards for grim. Most of the people we were hoping to see were there. There were a couple of other people I was glad to connect with, but the din of the crowd made conversation impossible. The floors were bare concrete; I was in agony by the second hour on my feet.   

The law school rebuilds itself every quarter century or so. A new library went up the first year I was there. That library has been superseded by a massive new structure that the alumni association was eager to show the party guests. I passed on the tour, my feet were so sore.

If I make it to my 50th reunion, no doubt there will be an even bigger new building to tour around. It's also certain I won't wear heels.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Stakeholdering

Domus emergen: the march of the fifty storey towers continues skyward 

Last week I alluded to a post from April 2016, where I mocked an unnamed Assistant Deputy Minister for using the word "stakeholder" as a verb.  You know... "we stakeholdered last month and are planning to do more stakeholdering next month ...."

Lazy, ugly jargon like this drives me crazy. 

The unidentified ADM in that post was from the Ministry of Energy, where I now work and where I fight a daily rearguard action against my staff's use of this irritating term in briefing materials.

This past week, I also finally met some energy sector stakeholders for a real live conversation about a proposed regulatory initiative.

None of my team or I knew these guys, but none of us expected anything different from the usual order of mumbled introductions, feigned interest in one another's opinions and friendly competition for air time. The meeting was really just to get the conversation going. My team and I expected to take whatever we got and use it for a more brass tacks discussion next week.

Just to get everything on the table early, after we all introduced ourselves, my team described what we thought was an agreed parameter for the program.

The stakeholders disagreed. Quite a lot. And got real heated about it.

One of them demanded that the meeting end. 

I've had stakeholders wig out on me before. The normal fix is to reassure them that no decisions have been made and that we have these conversations to shine light on areas of disagreement. 

I said it would be very helpful if we did not end the meeting and rather continue the discussion so they could help us understand their expectations which we were suddenly very curious to know.

As two of the folks at the table began to tell us their thoughts, another one - the one who wanted to end the meeting - was texting furiously on his phone.

We all saw this, and one of my team sent me a message saying he thought the stakeholder was texting our Minister's office.

A few minutes later, my boss was at the door of the meeting room, pretending that she needed all of her staff for a higher priority matter. She was very sorry but we would have to reschedule.

Disgusted, mortified, angry, I shut my computer and led my team out of the room. 

The stakeholder had not, as it turns out, sent a text to the Minister's office. 

He sent a text to the Premier's office.

The Premier's Office then contacted my Minister's office, who then contacted my Deputy Minister's office, who then reached out to my boss, who sped from her desk, climbed a flight of stairs, found us and ended the meeting.

This took five or six minutes, tops.

Just so you know that the bureaucracy can move fast when it needs to. 

And now I know why "stakeholdering" is such an ugly word at the Ministry of Energy.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen





















  

Neologisms - Part II

Burgess Shale Beasties - Lovingly recreated at the Tyrrell Museum

I learned two new words this week - new both to me and, I think, to the language.

Anecdata

People sometimes rely on evidence to make decisions. When that evidence is founded only in assertion and uncorroborated by facts, it is called anecdotal evidence. 

Nowadays, data is considered to be one of the highest orders of evidence. If you want to make a good decision, you have to look at the data. If the data is incomplete or cherry picked in order to provide a skewed or corrupt picture, it is anecdata.

A fossil of the first thing you'd think would rot away into nothing.

Consultelling 

When you consult with someone, you share your ideas with them and then respectfully hang around until they have told you what they think. Often what they tell you will help you modify or improve your idea. The name for this behaviour is consultation.

When you share your ideas with someone so they can understand that their fate is sealed so far as you are concerned, that is consultelling. 

****

I heard both these fanciful constructs at an Ivey Executive Training course. I'm not a trainee in the program. Rather, I am coaching a five-person team enrolled in the Ontario Public Service Leadership Development Program, a large part of which is the Ivey training. 

Each five member team - the members carefully selected to be the sorts that drive one another crazy - is challenged to come up with a proposal all three of useful, doable and attractive to the government of the day.

In the time-honoured pedagogical method of setting utter strangers on an impossible task, the empty space below illustrates how much actual information the teams were given to help them get started.






For about three hours on Friday, I sat, listened, said a few things but most of the time bit my tongue as the team struggled to find enough commonality among their number to land on anything at all.

They didn't. But they will. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen




  

Civics

Whenever there's a Ford in power, I feel more inclined to volunteer.

Last time, I helped clean up the Allan Gardens.

This time, I made a small effort to help re-elect my local councillor, Kristyn Wong-Tam.

A couple of weekends ago, working at her campaign office, I canvassed the ward by phone.

If you've never done it, it goes like this:

You sit at a desk with a phone and a computer. The computer has a program (not an app; this is old technology) that combines a data base and an auto-dialling machine. You click on a button that puts you into a particular campaign, you put the phone to your ear and you click "call." 

Then the auto-dialler does its thing. 

A name and number pops up on the screen and one of several things happens:

1) the phone rings four times and then the auto-dialler hangs up and moves to the next name and number
2) the phone rings and voicemail answers; if this happens, you click a button that sends an automated voicemail message, recorded by the candidate, to the automated voicemail answer as the auto-dialler moves to the next name and number.
3) someone answers; this happens once every ten or so calls. 

If someone answers, then, using my white voice, I read through my script. One of several things happens:

1) the person listens politely without interruption and then tells me they are voting for Wong-Tam. This happens about 4% of the time.
2) the person, when I ask for the name on my screen, tells me I have the wrong number. There is a 3% incidence rate on that outcome. 
3) the person listens politely until they hang up on me, 2% of the time.
4) 1% of the time, the person interrupts me when I say I'm calling on behalf of Wong-Tam and tells me they are not voting for her.
5) once, the person listens politely, marvels out loud that George Smitherman is also running, asks me what I think of Smitherman, observes that they personally don't need anything from anybody and then hangs up on me.

In an hour and a half, I logged 100 calls. That both did not seem like much to me and was just about all I could take, for my entire lifetime.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Karen

Waldo's down on his luck, but still wants to be found...

If you're reading this in Ward 13, get out and vote on October 22 to re-elect Wong-Tam!