First, we kill all the facilitators

P O'Neill is cursed to work for a large organisation. While this provides good Internet connections for blogging, there are some big downsides. Somehow we had managed to escape a heinous trend up until last month but we have now endured three meetings in four weeks which were organised around the same format. We assume that this trend is now all the rage in business schools and in the pages of the Harvard Business Review, so we feel compelled to warn those of you out there who haven't encountered it yet; if you work for an organisation of any size, you will. It's a development of a philosophy that was already used in corporate retreats: large group meets together, then divides into sub-groups for discussion of specific topics, then reconvenes for a plenary session where the sub-group discussions are summarised.

So what's new? Well, some unholy alliance of anthropologists and MBAs has hijacked the format, and now market themselves (doubtless for huge consulting fees) as facilitators. Now each group gets a huge flipchart to work with. There's an emphasis on capturing the immediacy of thoughts, so your table is covered with blank paper so any brainwave can be written down immediately. There can be different coloured pens to capture different types of idea. When writing down ideas, shapes and images are preferred to English. Sometimes, the idea can itself be written down on a shape, where the type of shape (or its colour) represents a genre of idea.

To mix things up, the composition of groups is changed frequently. So we all reintroduce ourselves and tell our lifestories again. Which is supposed to lead to more great ideas. After the second set of introductions today, we were thinking: is this a corporate meeting, or a group therapy session? Perhaps it would help the format if someone with no fear of being fired told their story like Dr Evil...my childhood was normal, summers in Rangoon, luge lessons... at the age of 14 a Zoroastrian named Vilma etc etc. All the while, the facilitator travels between tables to make sure the discussion is proceeding smoothly, and that each group has appointed a rapporteur -- as hierarchical as these corporate BS sessions are allowed to get.

We have several problems with this. First and foremost, it's a total waste of time. What emerges at the end is an unstructured wish list of corporate changes, which managers must inevitably whittle down and edit -- leaving what could have been gleaned from simple everyday office conversations, no pricey consultants required. In addition, like many of its bogus management theory predecessors, the underlying justification for this approach is built on a fallacy. This website describes the technique and justification. Note that the technique is being marketed as the World Cafe, so when you see these words on the memo describing your next corporate retreat, start working on your excuse to get out.

And the justification for the technique, as the name tries to capture, is the claim that many great things have emerged from casual conversations; indeed if we are to believe the website, the cafe style conversation format brought about the American and French revolutions, and the Northern European economic renaissance. But note the complete lack of scientific evidence for any of this. Note too the fallacy: good ideas have come out of casual round-table conversations, ergo, lets have lots of round table conversations and therefore we'll have lots of good ideas. DUDES! What about all the bad ideas that have come out of casual table conversations? Munich beer halls and Laffer curves drawn on napkins? And what about all the non-ideas -- the ones that would be sensibly dropped after two minutes of truly casual conversation, but which live on indefinitely in the flipcharts (and the essential digital photos thereof), coded shapes and colors, and plenary sessions of World Cafe meetings?

Go to the World Cafe website. And weep for a nation that allows the promoters of such trash to make a living.