Devil is in the Details

Monday morning 1000 hours the standard time for the Weekly Conferences and meetings in all HQs. I often wonder whether the conferences serve any purpose at all, on the contrary I think they are the bane of decision making. I am sure quite a few amongst us will wholeheartedly concur. If the boss finds it difficult to decide on a course of action and still wants to be seen as working diligently then the easiest way out is to call for a meeting. This malaise of meetings is a universal phenomena and cuts across all boundaries of corporate, bureaucracy, uniformed or academic fraternity. Deja vu! 

A surefire way of sending a proposal into an orbit is to call for a conference of all stakeholders. Firstly the boss has successfully avoided taking a decision, secondly he has put the complete team  in a spin, draft out an agenda, circulate it, although the agenda gets hijacked by the first speaker himself, if he is due for his report or appraisal not leaving the floor for the ones to follow. He has come prepared to put the attendees to death by power point. Microsoft Office has let this ghoul loose on this world which till then was happy with their Overhead Projector view-foils or slides. The beauty of these transparencies was that it required a draftsman to do them up for you, so there was a limit to the number of iterations it could be subjected to. But this means of torture called power point unleashed the devil in the commanders and bosses, where they could endlessly squabble over the scarlet, magenta, indigo.. pastel colours...their choice of colours would put any woman to shame. The animations and statistical charts available at the click of the mouse caught their fancy like that of a child with his new toy. As if this was not enough they would take a print out of these slides home and would not hesitate to call you in the middle of the night without as much as an apology for having woken you up, go on to explain the amendments which they wanted done by 0800 hours in the morning. Groggy and disoriented you were still trying to come to grips with what the boss's instructions when he disconnects, leaving you fully awake facing the nightmare of carrying out these corrections first thing in the morning.

Once the conferences commence there are many like me who switch off almost immediately and resort to testing my artistic skills by doodling with the sole purpose of keeping awake as it is, their sonorous dull monotone acts as a lullaby. Of course in between look at the speaker so as to appear to be really grasping every word and dutifully noting them down. At times I have even completed my blogs also in such long drawn affairs.

Agenda of most of the conferences in the Army is "danda", i.e. a good dressing down for anything and everything under the Sun. This danda is delivered within the first few minutes of the meeting, thereafter the participants are merely going through the motions. As if this wasn’t enough this Corona introduced another devil, the ubiquitous video conference, which has made life even more miserable for the employees. While the Armed Forces have always been a 24x7 round the clock job, for the first time even the Corporate guys were required to be available on call and that too on video. Naturally the frequency of conferences increased and misery multiplied manifold. The perils of video camera being on and the attendee not aware resulted in many a gaffes, some literally with their pants down.

I once attended an International Conference where I got to see the working of diplomacy at close quarters, language is a barrier but the way these diplomats play with words is to be seen to be believed. Every coma, full stop can convey a different meaning to the joint statement and hence the foreign office mandarins have to be masters of the language. While the conference itself was an update on the activities which was quite drab and dreary as nothing much had been achieved, but it had to be put in a way that appeared as though a lot had been accomplished. At the end of the day after squabbling over semantics for almost half a day, finally a joint communique was arrived at.  Devil was obviously in the details.

In complete contrast it’s a treat to see a unit in action, minimal orders, no time wasting conferences, just plain and simple action. If you want the work done, no conferences should be the mantra.

devil is in the details