Rathole Police
I was at a meeting yesterday where the presenting team handed out printed pictures of Remy, the rat from Ratatouille. We were to use these like judges’ cards or The Gong Show gong and hold them up whenever we thought the conversation was going down a rathole. Nice bit of meeting procedure, I thought. It quickly creates a shared goal of avoiding ratholes and creates a non-aggressive way of calling them out. I tried a little recursive humor, suggesting that we should spend a few minutes defining rathole, hoping that would prompt the first use of the card, but it turned out to be a sinkhole, as I had to waste time explaining that I was joking and then waste more time allowing for polite, embarassed for lame Mr Funny laughter.
My AP English teacher in High School taught my first management lesson. Each quarter, she would have each of us choose two writing habits that we were going to get out of or get into (“shun”ning the passive voice to use Strunk & White’s memorable phrasing was one of my big ones, and one I struggle with today as I see it everywhere today and find myself using constructions “One would . . . “). It would be cool, in the spirit of Intel’s meeting rules, to focus agency workplaces on avoiding rathole conversations . . . after some meetings about what it is.
May 4th, 2008 at 2:54 am
“Let’s define the rathole” is hardly an idea to be dismissed. In fact, the exercise might very well end up in agreement that ratholes are sometimes worth pursuing. If you followed Remy, you would have ended up in a kitchen that, for a time, was the talk of Paris. To follow Templeton would have revealed evidence of a carefully negotiated agreement to save the life of a pig. And Mrs. Frisby would have led you to a community of ultra-intelligent rats who, if I remember correctly, had gotten control of some amazing drugs or otherwise outsmarted the best and brightest at NIMH. The Intel rules of meetings would have you avoid all this?