|
| The oppressive nature of large organisations | | Date Created: Nov 30, 2005, 06:14 AM |
I was barely awake at another interminably long meeting yesterday afternoon. The meeting covered every minutiae of administrative processing and left me wondering what on earth these people tell their families and friends when asked what they do in the office --- possibly something along the lines of "I closed every possible loophole in the system."
The gem remark of the meeting came when someone asked for a paper to be amended and emotive words such as "oppressive" be removed as they betray a liberal bent in the writer. Now, I do not know for sure whether the writer is a bleeding heart liberal (and there really is nothing wrong with that) but the signal that any word that even hints at an ounce of emotion should be mercilessly purged rankled me deeply. It showed me why every paper that I have read in most public service organisations seem to be drafted from the same 1,000 word vocabulary, with such choice words as "integrate", "synthesise", "framework" that really don't mean anything.
At a deeper level, I wonder what this, and other signals do to drain the individualistic energy out of an organisation. In an era when organisations have to compete for knowledge workers by offering them a canvas to stretch and develop their individual skills (Tom Peters calls these opportunities WoW projects), what does this say for the attractiveness of the public service (and any other large organisation bent on churning out clones) to the brightest of our population.
I have to confess that I too have fallen prey to these editorial conventions in order to get my own papers passed. I remember a long time ago when a more idealistic me resolved to slip in one "non-civil-service-speak word" everyday in any paper or email. I had to stop when people implored me to stop sending them to the dictionary once a day. Thankfully, this happened before my limited vocabulary ran out. |
|
