Acknowledging the Elepha- Er, Gorilla In The Room
My teammate and I met up last week and had a great discussion. A few topics came up from my blog and I was really impressed with how differently my teammate views things. It was good to get an out-of-the-box perspective. Mostly we discussed my work and how I see MIS integrate with our human emotions. I shared a story of my own:
I get so frustrated every Tuesday. It is the designated day for Construction Scorecard Reports, a report I am completely convinced no one pays attention to. I feel this way because during the winter months I am not required to do them (there is no work to "score"), and this year I just never started the report back up in April. So, the second week of June the guilt gets the better of me and I crank out 6 weeks of the report and post it to the bulletin board.
I was venting this frustration to my teammate. We came to the conclusion that I need to ask someone to explain the value of what I am doing with these reports. I spend time doing them, taking away from tasks I fully see the value in, to complete this useless task. It makes me feel useless myself. Why have my do busy work if what I am supposed to be doing here is important?
How often does this same attitude poison other employees? I would say ALL. THE. TIME. Why hasn't anyone noticed this and done something about it?
We have a return to work meeting every year. This year we had a safety consultant service come in and give a presentation. The speaker was a very interesting guy. He got our attention right away by showing this video of 4 kids bouncing and throwing a couple basketballs between them. Before he started the video he gave us the task of counting how many times the basketballs hit the floor with the bounces. Easy, right?
Well when the video was finished he asked us to raise our hand as he called out the number of times we thought the balls hit the floor. The room had hands up on 3 different numbers. We couldn't all catch how many times the ball hit the floor. I thought this was the point of the video, but I was wrong. He then asked us,
"So how many of you saw the gorilla?"
Laughs. Shrugs........but no show of hands.
What gorilla?
So, just to prove he was showing us the same video, he said he was going to literally rewind the one we had just watched. So as he dragged the mouse back to the beginning, I strained to watch the screen. I figured some little gorilla character would pop up in a hidden spot that was difficult to detect...and then I saw the gorilla.
A kid dressed in a giant gorilla suit walked casually through the center of the kids playing with the basketballs. I did not see it. No one saw it. I almost didn't believe my eyes.
We watched the video again. I had to stop paying attention to the basketballs entirely to watch the gorilla.
I feel like I am doing these reports like I am counting basketballs hitting the floor. While I focus on this, some giant gorilla is walking straight through the room. I think the video teaches us a lot of things, but I think the most important is this: step back and see the whole picture.
I know there is a point to these reports on a given day, at a given moment so they have to be completed. But to ensure I do my job well I need to know why. It might help me pull my eyes up from the reports, just long enough to see the gorilla walk across the room.
I get so frustrated every Tuesday. It is the designated day for Construction Scorecard Reports, a report I am completely convinced no one pays attention to. I feel this way because during the winter months I am not required to do them (there is no work to "score"), and this year I just never started the report back up in April. So, the second week of June the guilt gets the better of me and I crank out 6 weeks of the report and post it to the bulletin board.
I was venting this frustration to my teammate. We came to the conclusion that I need to ask someone to explain the value of what I am doing with these reports. I spend time doing them, taking away from tasks I fully see the value in, to complete this useless task. It makes me feel useless myself. Why have my do busy work if what I am supposed to be doing here is important?
How often does this same attitude poison other employees? I would say ALL. THE. TIME. Why hasn't anyone noticed this and done something about it?
We have a return to work meeting every year. This year we had a safety consultant service come in and give a presentation. The speaker was a very interesting guy. He got our attention right away by showing this video of 4 kids bouncing and throwing a couple basketballs between them. Before he started the video he gave us the task of counting how many times the basketballs hit the floor with the bounces. Easy, right?
Well when the video was finished he asked us to raise our hand as he called out the number of times we thought the balls hit the floor. The room had hands up on 3 different numbers. We couldn't all catch how many times the ball hit the floor. I thought this was the point of the video, but I was wrong. He then asked us,
"So how many of you saw the gorilla?"
Laughs. Shrugs........but no show of hands.
What gorilla?
So, just to prove he was showing us the same video, he said he was going to literally rewind the one we had just watched. So as he dragged the mouse back to the beginning, I strained to watch the screen. I figured some little gorilla character would pop up in a hidden spot that was difficult to detect...and then I saw the gorilla.
A kid dressed in a giant gorilla suit walked casually through the center of the kids playing with the basketballs. I did not see it. No one saw it. I almost didn't believe my eyes.
We watched the video again. I had to stop paying attention to the basketballs entirely to watch the gorilla.
I feel like I am doing these reports like I am counting basketballs hitting the floor. While I focus on this, some giant gorilla is walking straight through the room. I think the video teaches us a lot of things, but I think the most important is this: step back and see the whole picture.
I know there is a point to these reports on a given day, at a given moment so they have to be completed. But to ensure I do my job well I need to know why. It might help me pull my eyes up from the reports, just long enough to see the gorilla walk across the room.
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