#57 - Human Expectations

A lot of my job this last month consisted of thinking about opening meeting icebreakers. Like, beyond just coming up with the prompts for them, I’ve had to think about the breakdown of their form and function, coming up with explanations of how to run them effectively, and explaining why they benefit the group that does them well.

The classic “say a fun fact about yourself” is not an icebreaker! Icebreakers should not be things that force you to remember something (slash quietly compete for the coolest most backdoor braggy fact to blurt out), no no, a good icebreaker is a question you’ve never been asked before, bonus if all of the answers to it would be funny or light or allow some introspection into the person saying it.

Quick, what’s your favorite type of furniture to sit on?

Mines a deep chair with an ottoman in front of it. If my legs are able to be up in the air while I sit, I am thrilled. My grandfather had an Eames chair (which I definitely didn’t recognize by brand when I was a child but it turns out that finding exact replicas of “Daddo’s chair” was much easier than I was expecting) and I’ve been on the hunt for one in the, you know, $300 range as opposed to the ones listed for over a thousand ever since!

Okay, anyway, would love to know your answer to the chair question (and tell me a story behind it too plz let’s bond over random shit)!

Ready for some deep intel on the professional facilitation community? A lot of people whose job it is to help groups connect with each other do not believe that allowing the group to do that in a low-stakes way right up top would benefit the rest of the session. Facilitate means “to make easy” in a literal translation sense. I more aware than anyone of what a nebulous concept “facilitation” is, let alone how few of us are exposed to anything that has ever been a well-facilitated experience despite the fact that every single time we interact in a group setting it would be beneficial to have an appointed person who is thinking about how to make the experience the most of whatever it’s aiming to be. To clarify via specific examples to make this tangible: what is the purpose of a given meet-up? Even if we’re getting together for a casual hang out, the purpose of the gathering is leisure, and there could be even more leisure achieved if one person (or the group) thought about how to create an even more calm and restful experience on purpose. (I swear this isn’t just the Virgo in me talking this is the “wrote 50,000 words about facilitation last week” part of me yappin’ away here.) If we’re getting together at work for a meeting, I only want to go if I know that someone has put time and effort into an agenda and will use the time they’ve forced me to carve out of my schedule to relay the necessary information, but also my presence at that meeting has to matter—like if there isn’t an opportunity for me to provide purpose, then the meeting could (and should!) have literally been an email.

A real meeting can’t be an email, because people do not gather synchronously and get to hear and see each other and connect as humans in an email. It is so easy to build resentment and bad faith readings when it comes to co-workers emailing about a project (and like, of course there’s tension because everyone is trying to prove their job matters! Even though, to be honest, most jobs that would have email chains about a project ultimately probably don’t matter because most of what we produce now is actually ineffective or pollutive and probably some form of marketing and just a distraction of capitalism to keep our labor in lock step and create competition over the measly scraps that we workers have access to but it’s okay because if I can get that promotion/raise instead of my co-worker, I can finally afford the Honeydew set from Felt & Fat and if my bowls are pretty then I won’t mind as much that I have no way to traverse the world in a way that does not negatively harm it because the things required to live in modern society which forces us to make decisions that injure our souls and then we double down and triple down because of sunk cost fallacy but also the fact that we need money to in order to stay alive because I have no rights to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness unless my output can be measured and skimmed off of by the government in order to fund wars and commit internationally catastrophic crimes because the United States is just a bunch of arms dealers in a trench coat and of course we can’t hold Russia accountable for war crimes because then we would have to hold the United States accountable and the people in charge of holding the US accountable have sat, idle, in congress in their positions of power for over 40 years and are so addicted to that power our literal only option apparently is to pry it out of their cold dead hands (and we can’t even expect the younger generation to be able to do anything because they need access to the War Chest because ever since we passed Citizens United you actually can’t run for office unless you have a billion dollars so you have to give up your morals for access to the powers that be and maybe you believe that you can eventually make a difference but you have to be there to do it, but also maybe you’ve just have gotten a taste of power and now refuse to give it up) so they’re never going to cop to what they know re: how bad the government is and how corrupt they are because of what they’ve had to do to stay in power and so they double down and now we’re all gonna die because GM wanted to sell more cars so they ripped out the trolley between Queens and Brooklyn and now the air is poisoned and the commute from Ridgewood to Astoria is two hours long via Subway and they’ve just fully ceased trying to figure out how to serve the general public over the like six shareholders who apparently make money from everyone else’s labor and since the government is designed to grant public goods and fix roads and bridges but now instead consists of just a bunch of rich people looking around going “it’s democracy Michael, what could it cost, ten dollars?” and now we’re all too poor to afford a missed paycheck so we have to keep our heads down regardless of the tasks we’re burdened with because yeah maybe that thing we’re doing is bad/wrong but not having a home is constantly hanging over all of our heads at all times) and gathering together for a shared purpose is actually what strengthens communities.

(And humans are social creatures who literally need each other to survive and we create better and more often when with others so that’s why meetings can’t be emails but we’re so often not actually going to meetings, we’re being asked to go to a lecture so that someone can make sure we took in some specific information—because despite being staffed by adults, most jobs operate in a surveillance state that assumes the worst of every single employee! “Oh but what about employee theft?” Well maybe people would steal from their jobs less if we PAID THEM MORE but also the largest ongoing theft in history is wage theft that benefits corporations to the tune of BILLIONS each year and that’s why it’s really important to check your paystubs!)

(And honestly, it’s probably a decent explanation of the attention economy that everyone is so wrapped up in themselves that we fail to witness each other, and other people feel that dearth of care (because it’s easy to mistake attention for care) and so it’s become a self-perpetuating machine of “look at me please someone look at me” that social media companies have figured out how to best exploit.)

I think a big reason that most meetings fail is that we generally have no known expectations. What should I be thinking about before I get there, why does my presence (beyond a body check and a feeling of direct power over me) contribute to the meeting and the group? Are we going to be doing something that can only happen if all of us are there? Does anything I bring up actually get factored into the final decision or is this just some form of Managerial Theatre? Because if it’s the latter, fine, but there better be some form of fun beverage and snack provided.

And also I think a big pitfall of a lot of “planned” meetings is that they fail to actually factor in the real human reactions of the people they’re gathering. Having human expectations of each other instead of projections of the flattened experiences of humanity that we can quickly scroll past as we gather everyone’s reactions to every single thing in their life. Of course people have main character syndrome, of course everyone is co-opting the language of social justice to say wild shit like "having a lot of books is performative ableism”, we’re spending so much time in a world where nothing is ever being said to each other, but rather at each other.

I think the energy of most workplaces is probably pretty terrible. Working from home is so appealing for so many reasons, and I can’t think of anything I would ever want to do less than commute to any building that even slightly resembles a WeWork. Sitting in a glass fishbowl while no one talks to each other but slack notifications go off every five seconds? Yikes, no thanks, get me outta there! Even when I worked for a very cool independent pet store, I had no windows in my office and was constantly surrounded by nine other people trying to do their jobs. It’s so fun to try and negotiate with brand reps in front of an audience. No better situation to try and be on Serious Work Calls about truck pallet limits than when Happy Birthday was being sung by 15 people behind me! And I loved that place, I have a lot of fond memories and experiences, I met some really great people that I wish I had been in a better place to actually form bonds with (because, looking back, living in Portland really felt like one long panic attack) but I also fucking resented when my boss would tell me something wasn’t possible when I knew what he really meant was “that would cut into the overall profit”. And I knew he was a good guy, like a very very nice and decent dude! The only limit to what was possible at that store was this one man’s imagination though, and because he couldn’t figure out why the turnover rate was so high (the job was difficult to get good at, people were burnt out from training so many people in a row, the store operated at such a high volume every single day that it felt like you had always run a marathon after the shift, and the employee perks got obliterated over time but some people still remembered the days when lunch was legit catered once a week as thanks for being able to survive the rush of any given shift so we were bitter about any form of food that wasn’t to that level), dozens of employees burned out. When I left I gave him that feedback (because he was often very upfront about wanting feedback) but there was no way I was going to tell him while I worked there that he lacked imagination beyond what he had already seen and it was hurting the vibes. In what world could I expect that not to linger in our relationship? Appropriateness at work was not something I understood for most of my 20s, but being afraid of my bosses kept me in some sort of line some of the time, probably to my soul’s detriment and my bank account’s content.

Human expectations! Feedback isn’t easy! You have to create a culture of anything besides fear at a company. The job I have right now is the first job that I have not had the specter of being fired hanging over my head at any given time because I know that my boss is also my sister, so if she did suddenly drop the ax, we would still have to deal with the fallout. And I trust that if I ever did anything that would be an immediately fireable offense I would uh, understand where she’s coming from. Like, this isn’t to say she couldn’t fire me, but that I trust it wouldn’t be sudden and come outta left field, ya know? We’re motivated by what we’re doing, the capacities we believe change is possible in and through rather than an unfocused frightened frenzy of “please don’t yell at me.”

So I’ve realized through the absence of that feeling just how present it always was. Despite never doing anything to purposefully sabotage any job I’ve ever had, I operated solely from a place of fear at most of my jobs until the fear adrenaline ran out and I burned out, crashed, and got a new job (or moved across the country, as I am wont to do).

Late stage capitalism is lame, but we’re doing a lot to demand that we all remember that corporations run on the labor of people. I’m glad we’ve entered the fuck around and find out stage of labor rights, Chris Smalls deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom. People come to meetings, people have ideas, people are being paid unliveable wages. Not the idea of people, not the notion of a worker or blob of “labor”, but a living breathing being whose brain has been slowly rewired to operate as an extended form of an Excel spreadsheet. People have emotions, they care about things, and they have deep rooted motivations that if they were allowed to express in relation to their work would only enhance the quality.

When we bring people together, allowing them a moment to socially callibrate through a low-stakes question is not a waste of time, or frivolous. Of course it isn’t, no chance to connect with each other is a waste, it’s what we were put on this earth to do. Human’s just want to eat, sit around a fire, whittle instruments, distill grains into liquor and figure out what local flora will allow them to trip balls. The notion of a 9-5 makes no sense if a cow can only be milked once a day! Human connection is all anything is based on—there is no amorphous monster named Capitalism dictating all of this, it’s people in boardrooms who have become so disconnected from their humanity that they can’t understand why every single person deserves to be able to afford a comfortable existence regardless of their output of labor. (Fuck you, Ayn Rand.) All the way at the tippity the top, it’s still just a person. (And based on every Successful Dude’s memoir, they’re probably pretty lonely and paranoid. Or sinking their “excess capital” (by which they mean the profits they’ve stolen from their employees) into mega-yachts because they just want to be alone and pollute the earth to their hearts content, okay??)

And that’s what makes it so heartbreaking—we’re doing it to each other and humans are capable of so much more. The workdays should have gotten shorter when the technology got better. If automation could really replace workers, wouldn’t it have happened by now? Sure, machines don’t take sick days, but they do break down, and they still need a human to come maintenance them. They’re also impersonal and cold and will never leave anyone with a lasting warm and fuzzy feeling that propels them to think fondly of the company!! If it was actually better to have everyone do self-checkout, it would have happened already. But robots are finicky and you still need to hire someone to come punch in bypass codes and check IDs and tell the thing to stop panicking because it didn’t register that you already have put the item in the bagging area, actually.

We actually need people. Not because of cost, not because of convenience, but because we don’t just exist within society, we are society. And we’re social creatures!!

So, anyway, that’s why I think that starting with a fun and light icebreaker that causes people think of an answer rather than remember a script is well worth the time it takes whenever a group is gathered together.