Team Briefing

a new and exciting form of information dissemination. In the past we were told nothing by our Executive Board, things "just happened", a bit like natural disasters. By the time you were aware of a problem it was too late, all that you could do was initiate an emergency relief programme. As in life generally, these tended to be too little, too late. Now we have Team Briefs, as the nomenclature implies, these involve the whole department (or team) gathering to be briefed by our Director. The word "brief" should in no way be confused with the concept of a short length of time. These are obviously designed to ensure that our attention spans should be tested to the extreme, a bit like one of those cetrifugal testing machines, where your head is made to spin with the banality and absurdity of the information deemed to be important enough to be imparted. A new and exciting development occurred during yesterday's Brief, a team member actually fell asleep, not in a snoring slumbering way, but more of a oops I shut my eyes and drifted off method. Cunningly the guilty party had located herself directly next to the Director, thus ensuring no direct eye contact and the realisation of the fact that she was indeed asleep. For myself and several others this created a novel way of enduring the Team Brief - would the sleeping party betray herself? Every twitch and nod of the head was greeted by a wall of faces almost willing a revelation. Alas the slouching did not reach the critical angle to ensure hilarity, and the sound of the meeting breaking up roused her without incident. Denial soon followed when accusations were made. She had apparently closed her eyes to focus on the words, seemingly forgetting her prior claims to be partially deaf, and normally requesting that when talking to her it is vital that she can also read your lips. A more malicious person would have made up information that she somehow had missed, sorry, I mean a more malicious person would have made up more malicious information that she missed than I did. One and a half hours were taken up to tell us that the Organisational Realignment that we are currently undertaking is taking longer than previously expected. Oh and Management Accounts have formalised their Year End Plan, with a timetable available to interested parties. Somehow I don't think Sting will be worried about trees being cut down for that little gem.