Yellow Card

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Yellow Card

The whole idea of "planning" what you are doing really took hold of all Organization when the Network planning system developed in the USA proved so successful. Twenty years later it became the no-stock system adapted by all major producers.

The basic idea was that the components of a project should be on the spot just at the moment they were needed, certainly not after they were needed, the whole point being that the system made it possible for you to compute how early the components could arrive at the "nod" point in the network system.

That is of course rather different from the way an International Civil Service systems works, were you are always late, sometimes very late, were components of an activity are dropped for lack of time, were components are distorted and malfunctioning because you do not have the time to make them any better.

The Networking ssytem was never applied at our low level of Technical Officers, we remained on the tray IN and tray OUT system and the priority was according to the whims of the Higher ups.

One of the unexpected results of such an emotional system is that when an Officer has his desk overloaded with plenty of small tasks, most of them urgent, one big task demanding a lot of time, but very urgent and very important, experience shows that to escape from the stress, the Officer will neither undertake small tasks rapidly solved or attack the big mountain but will devote time to an irrelevant low priority job. But he will come and work during the week-end or at night, to solve the important issues, taking advantage of the decrease of the feeling of stress during these hours.

This is not very remarkable, when my cat feel stress, he starts cleaning his fur which has no need of it.

Yellow card

You do not like meetings?

You feel that they are useless? That they waste your time? That there will always be one participant who had too much to say, many who have too little courage? That your opinion is of no value?

You feel that in-service training is a waste of time? That the subject you are taught has no relevance to your work? That you are wasting your time while work is accumulating on your desk?

So many reasons for not liking meetings and in-service training courses. Yet the meetings continue, the in-service training courses expand and get more and more expensive.

Why not try and make that moment something of value?

Our trainers at FAO knew quite well that we were fidgety during the training courses as we were worrying about the “IN” tray swelling and swelling, worried about all these cases needing our hurried and immediate action.

They knew that we would not listen to any lecture as our mind was fully preoccupied with out job; As church goers who cannot remember a world of the sermon as their mind was meandering about their own problems, we were very bad listeners. Most of us would have a notebook next to us and suddenly scribble something in it, as we had suddenly remembered an action we had forgotten to take.

Not a very good public for a trainer, how shall he get the attention of his trainees?

Therefore the training was based on “doing” not on listening and the training was based on problem solving rather than theory.

You want an example of problem solving.

The Trainer gave us two glasses, and 6 table knifes. The glasses were set at a distance superior to the length of a knife.

Our task, if you accept it, will be to built a bridge between these two pillars using the six knifes. The group has thirty minutes to solve the problem. One group will work in room “A”, one group will work in room “B”.

And we would set at work. Once you know how to do it, it is rather obvious. If you have never done it before in your life, you start with a lot of stupid solutions.

The thirty minutes are over, both groups come back in the training room and group “A” is requested to explain to group “B”, using words only, how the problem can be solved.

Group “A” has to select a speaker, who starts explaining to group “B” how they did it. Tension appears to increase as apparently group “B” does not seem to understand the explanation, more and more participants of group “A” feel that they must intervene, that there chosen speaker does not do a good job, tension increases even more, until the Trainer stops the exercise and asks us to write down on a sheet of yellow card our impressions.

The cards are hung on the wall, the participants go round the cards and the confusion does no abate.

Something is very wrong.

Something is very wrong indeed, group “A” was explaining to group “B” how to built a bridge between two pillars, while group “B” was expecting to get the solution for building a bridge between 3 pillars.

We all made the same error, we assumed that we knew what was the problem and we never undertook to check first of all what the problem was.

We all felt that the participants in group “B” were malingering idiots for not understanding and group “B” felt that group “A” was composed of inept trainers who could not even explain such a simple task.

Then came the interesting part, the post mortem of the task.

The participants were requested to sit and think about the problem, the solution, what happened in this case, what should have been done, how this applied to their working situation.

Then the trainer metamorphosed himself into a mediator next to the blackboard and asked us to give our comments.

Here comes the part of training we all dread, one of the participants will prove to be a big mouth, one will prove to be a “I know better”, one will be only interested in being sarcastic, many will withdraw into autism, quite often two of the participants will start hating one another, groups will form, one group supporting this man, another group supporting that man.

The mediator lets that bad situation develop; then he interrupts.

The solution?

A very simple solution, a yellow card.

The mediator asks the participants for their views;

After a bit of twisting and grumbling, one participant starts speaking. After some seconds, certainly less than a minute, the Mediator asks him to write down in large letters his remark with a felt-pen. The card is attached to the board.

Another participant has view, same procedure.

After five to ten cards have been displayed, the Mediator asks whether the participants can group the cards and place them in such a way that the ones which are nearest in their content be nearest to one another on the board.

A kind of logic is developing. The logic is not frozen. The placement of the cards on the board can be very unsatisfactory and suddenly one of the participants will propose a replacement.

At the same time the Mediator is keeping a watchful eye on the participants at the back of his mind; I love sentences that do not make sense.

As the participants are getting tired of the cards about the bridge problem he asks them to carry out a post mortem on the way they were getting into a war situation.

The same procedure will develop; another wall is covered with cards;

As the participants get tired of the war problem, the Mediator asks them to carry out a post-mortem about their work with the yellow cards.

Another wall is covered with cards.

Then the group after a coffee break, which tends to be rather vocal, return to the bridge problem and the bridge cards.

We are reaching the point that my Big Boss loved: what simple conclusion should we draw from each exercise.

And now we are reaching the point that the FAO trainer had in mind all the time, in which way does this exercise apply to your own working situation and what will you do to apply what you learned to your present job.

And the trainer is very precise, he demands that each one of us writes down how this insight applies to his present work and in what way it will change his working methods immediately;

At the end of the day, when we are rounding up the summaries, the FAO trainer asks us;

Are you going to present what you have learned to you Big Boss and will you ensure that your ideas are accepted?.

Want to cry with me?

Most of us at the training sessions are honest, we clearly state that we will briefly tell our Big Bosses what we have learned, that the modifications suggested will be rejected by the Big Bosses and that daily work will continue in it's traditional chaotic and irrational way.

Something similar was used in Burundi in a system being God-fathered by the German Assistance Organization. One you start putting order into your thinking, there is really no limit to what you can do and the funds you can save and the errors you can avoid.