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| Burgess Shale Beasties - Lovingly recreated at the Tyrrell Museum |
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.
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| A fossil of the first thing you'd think would rot away into nothing. |
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.
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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
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