Resolutions and How To Break Them (1)
The Head Room. Decorated as for a New Year’s party. At center stage: the Un, the Vulcan, the Engineer, and the Hunter. The Un and the Storyboarder wear festive hats.
Un: New Year’s resolutions. That’s our turf. Everybody makes resolutions. Everybody expects to break resolutions.
Explorer: Everybody does break resolutions.
Un: The only way you could improve on that is to break the resolutions before you make them. Or if the Head Nazis bother you, pick resolutions you are going to keep.
Networker: Like resolve never to eat a live toad.
Whys Guy: Why make resolutions if you are going to break them?
Vulcan: Perhaps it is not logical. Perhaps it is just human.
Networker: If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.
Hunter: Or perhaps you just don’t understand the objective.
Vulcan: Logically, the objective must be to break resolutions. Otherwise, people would not keep doing it.
Whys Guy: Why would people want to break resolutions? Why would people say they are going to do something when they are not going to do it?
Vulcan: Your language hides the answer. The language channel makes resolutions. So in clarified language: Why would the language channel make a resolution when the language channel is not going to carry it out?
Engineer: The language channel is never going to carry out a resolution. The language channel is just going to make promises. The Engineers have to deliver. Or not deliver if the language channel made the promise without checking with us.
Explorer: That sounds just like the engineering department in a corporation: “The Marketing Department makes big promises. Then Engineering is supposed to figure out how to make the product, on time, and within budget.”
Networker: Easy promises make hard deliveries.
Engineer: We feel their pain. Especially when Marketing promises something that can’t be done.
Un: Does Engineering ever come up with something on its own? What happens then?
Explorer: Marketing complains that Engineering didn’t bother to find out whether customers would want it.
Canter: Nothing to be done. Neither one can put out a marketable product.
Un: So there aren’t any new products being put out.
Vulcan: That conclusion is inconsistent with observation. There must be an unspoken assumption here.
Explorer: You can sit on your assumptions. We’ve got facts. Companies make connections between Engineering and Marketing. Meetings, e-mail, cross-drafting. New products are evaluated both by Marketing and by Engineering.
Networker: Companies have their own Networkers.
Un: Companies try to get all their parts to work together in a team effort.
Vulcan: Toward the same objective.
Un: Unity. In a business as in a head.
Silence.
