A glimpse into an unfamiliar world

I just finished attending an intensive 4 day workshop on Instructional Design and Facilitation Skills... came away with several interesting thoughts and tools to apply at work, as well as a sense of the irrelevance of some of them.

I'm remembering how, when I resisted the super-mechanical five paragraph essay format taught to us in freshmen year, Karen Bauman told me that it was okay to break the rules... once I had understood them. In my years as a tutor and writing fellow, I learned what she meant: new writers (or even old writers new to the academic essay format) needed those formats as a scaffolding to build upon... but once they had built, it was ok for the scaffolding to fade away. In fact, it should fade away-- who wants to see the scaffolding on a completed building? I learned it was ok to break the rules, provided one knew why one was breaking them; it wasn't ok to break the rules simply because one didn't know better.

I'm now going back to that in order to overcome my resistance to what often feels like too much structure in this instructional design process we have worked on over the last few days. It's the only way I know of striking a balance between what I know is a useful format and my own individual style of working (despite every professor's best efforts, I never successfully wrote an outline before writing my first draft but instead always used the outlining process to revise my first draft into a more coherent paper. Outlines right at the beginning would stump me because I needed to write my first draft to figure out what I wanted to say, and only then could I outline the most logical way to say it). So yes, I'm telling myself, I need to master these tools. But eventually, I need to make them work for me; I refuse to work for them. It's the only meaningful process for me, but it's going to take a lot of time and effort, and actually, a much greater mastery of the process. Darn it, why must I always make life more difficult for myself? ;)

The other thing about this workshop was the experience of representing the only NGO there, in a room full of corporates, most of them MNCs.

The first part was something between amusement and anger at the attitudes and assumptions that people brought to the table. One fairly high-level employee of one of the largest MNCs I know asks me why I chose to join the social sector... before I can even answer, she answers her own question for me, "I guess you are still young, so you probably don't yet feel prepared to take on the corporate world." Huh?! Wow, the arrogance of assuming that everyone is aspiring for the job you have, and that if someone doesn't get into it, it's because they are weak. I told her politely but firmly that I have no intention of ever joining the corporate sector and am passionate about the work I do; not sure the message hit home, but what else can one say?

A lot of other things, especially their attitudes vis-a-vis competition and "growth," the subtle in their tones as they talked about employees with "inferior capacity" when they simply meant employees who don't speak fluent English, and their largely discourteous and sometimes high-handed behavior towards the waiters serving us tea and lunch, really disturbed me. But all of this also convinced me yet again of the importance of a college education like the one I was fortunate enough to receive-- an education that does not seek necessarily to connect you to the social sector, but does demand that you be conscious of and sensitive to other people regardless of the nature of your work. And especially an education that demands you realize your debt of gratitude to people who never went to school and college-- to the masons who built the halls you study in, to the taxpayers whose money subsidizes your education, to the people who have cooked and cleaned and done all the chores that have allowed you to grow as you did. Once we are truly cognizant of this, could we possibly scold a waiter for forgetting to bring saunf at the end of the meal, or leave the place in a mess, saying that the rest is his problem, and not even bother thanking him for cleaning up after us?

Of course, I'm generalizing. Of course, not everyone in the social sector is aware of and sensitive to people... I've seen NGOs doing great work in the field but not speaking politely to the maid who cleans their office. And of course not everyone in the corporate sector is insensitive to others-- the founders of the organization I work for themselves came from the corporate sector.

Still, it's all important food for thought for me... and at the least I have come away concinvced I am not cut out for the corporate sector and grateful for everyone who showed me myself clearly enough over the last few years for the never even to have crossed my mind!