Bring Your Child to Work, Leave Your Inner Child at Home?

Thursday was take your child to work day. While I work from home that day and did not see the display of kids in the office, every day I am privy to people bringing their “inner child” to work, i.e. people who use childlike logic to explain what something didn’t get done, to rationalized what went wrong and to place blame somewhere else in general.

Parent: What is that in your arms

Child: A puppy

Parent: What?

Child: Well we discussed it.

Parent: Yes, you said wanted a puppy and we said no.

It’s obvious with kids, maybe a little less obvious at work. I was in a meeting that discussed consolidating servers. There were a lot of questions about network degradation and availability. After the meeting, I and my team expected the support team to address our concerns. To our surprise, the consolidation took place the following week to much mayhem and disruption. The support team’s response was, well, we discussed it.  Yes, we discussed it and we said no.

Apparently, the entire team thought about how to mitigate a future occurrence. At the next meeting, support asked us to form a workgroup to study an issue. While we hadn’t talked as a team, our questions were similar and are a good way to mitigate the expectations from, we discussed it.

Is this decided? Does our input impact the outcome?

What happens next? Who is going to do what? When will know the outcome?

What are the expectations for our team?

Sure they got a little wily with responses. They even used a time-worn technique of providing answers, unfortunately, not to the questions asked. Chances are you will experience this and a few times, you will use the child logic. You kind of mention you will not be around in the afternoon, but you don’t really ask. So, we’re all kids, just remember to take recess every now and follow the rules.

Mention does not mean there was a discussion.

Discussions do not mean there was a decision.

Decisions do not mean it is done.*

*I decided I wanted to jump from sofa to sofa. Trust me, this was not done and there is a video to prove it 🙂