Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Group

I have two and a half days remaining at this contract - I'm spending about 20% of my time here working on work projects, the rest of the time working on freelance. I have very little to do. I am getting a taste of what it would have been like had I been a project manager working strictly on interactive projects here: tastes easy. Too bad I accepted the crazy program management job sprinkled with a project management piece on a DM project. But hey, I didn't know. And now I do.

The remaining 80% is on 2 freelance projects - the e-commerce implementation, and a small web site for a children's care center in Toronto. That's fun stuff.

Was in the final (for me) production meeting today - all the project managers sit around and find their fit in the family by being witty, quiet, smart, bored, by sitting away from the group, by leaning in over the table as though they are trying to hold everyone closely, by being consistently late for the group, by being especially grumpy or especially silly or especially judgemental in the group. Oh family - how we never leave you and how you never leave us.

These Production group meetings are supposed to achieve 2 things, I think: 1. group identity building, cohesion stuff. This meeting meets this objective, albeit weakly. Nothing verbally or otherwise is done to engage us as a group or between members of the group. That should be the responsibility of the facilitator or leader. 2. Facilitate communication pieces that cannot be effectively communicated via other methods. This meeting does not achieve this objective well. 95% of the items ever raised could have been sent out in an e-mail. If I ran the meetings things would be different, yeah boy. I'd have a show and tell. I'd have a group hamster cage, I'd name the hamster Gord. Gord the hamster would sleep during the meetings because Gord is diurnal.

So the new book I"m reading is The Schopenhauer Cure by my old hero Irvin Yalom. There's a guy who is running his life as per Schopenhauer's dictums and philosophies. There's a guy trying to redeem his life as he dies of cancer. To redeem himself he tries to cure this Schopenhauer guy of his craziness by engaging in a dialectical therapy of sorts, within a group therapy context. I'm going to read it 10 more times. I love it. I love reading Dr. Yalom's group therapy stories - nothing is as good as good group therapy I bet.

I love chocolate and of late have grown to love Skor bars. I am going to get one now.