Socialising a New Model

Communication is, or so I’m told, important. By and large, I’d agree with that; communication and thumbs have made us the dominant species on the planet. Communication allows us to share thought and ideas, thumbs allow us to pick things up and flick elastic bands at one another. They’re both marvellous things. From an organisational perspective it’s good to talk and to find out what’s going on should you wish it to be successful. But just talking, or sending a message, really doesn’t count as communication as far as I’m concerned. It’s got to be a two-way thing where the communicator and the communicated to both go their separate ways with a clear understanding of what’s just been said. If they both end up with the same clear understanding then so much the better. What I’m trying to say is that if you’re going to “communicate” you need to try to make sure that what you’re communicating is clear and has been understood by the third party, or parties if you’re more popular than me.

The reason I’m banging on about this is that I’ve been “communicated” with by Dave. And here is just one small part of the communication which Dave has sent:

“Chris will be socialising a new model for the approval of production changes during the day to our senior stakeholders “. And well done to Chris, I wish him well with it. But what is it he’s actually doing? I haven’t got a clue! To help me to understand the message, I’ve tried breaking it down word by word.

According to my dictionary ‘socialising’ means, “make fit for life in companionship with others”.  OK, fine, I get that but it raises a question. You see, I thought that the “model” he referred to must be a business model, defined as “a standard or example for imitation or comparison”. But you can’t socialise one of those can you? It’d be impossible. So that presumably means that the model Chris will be socialising is instead “a person whose profession is posing for artists or photographers”. This is a surprising development so it was well worth Dave taking the time to communicate it to the team.

Let’s press on. Our new model, not named in the communication probably in the interests of Data Protection, is being socialised for approval so I guess that after that approval process we’ll decide whether or not they’re the sort of model we’re after. Strange, I would’ve thought we’d have covered that in the selection process rather than letting it get to a socialisation scenario. Now I come to think of it, we’ve never done a socialisation session for any other new person in all the years I’ve been with the firm. Maybe this is a change to our recruitment process? Could this be the “production changes” that the communication makes reference to? It seems unlikely as these are “recruitment changes” and not “production changes”. How confusing!

But hold on, we’re not approving the new model; the approval has to come from these “production changes”. Now I’m even more confused! Production changes are things aren’t they; not people? So how are we to know whether they approve of our model or not? Unless I’m reading it wrong and the model has got to approve the production changes. Ah, that makes more sense! Except, wouldn’t it be better to get the production changes approved by someone who works in the production area rather than passing it over to a person whose profession is posing for artists or photographers? Unless of course this is what our production changes will entail. But that’s d be really strange. This is an insurance company!

And these are production changes are happening “during the day”. This is a surprisingly rapid rate of change, especially if we are going from insurance to modelling. Still, no point in dawdling I suppose if we’ve decided that this is the way we want the business to go. And actually it appears that these production changes happening during the day are only happening to our senior stakeholders. They’re an important bunch but there aren’t that many of them which is presumably why Chris feels he can make the changes so quickly.

So, in summary “Chris will be taking a new person whose profession is posing for artists or photographers and making them fit for life in companionship with others to enable them to approve some production changes which are happening that day to our senior stakeholders”

Now I understand the sentence but I’m still not sure that I understand what Chris is doing or even why. So I decide to send a reply to Dave asking for clarity. Strangely, he doesn’t reply. Does the man not realise how important it is to communicate?

Tags: Jim Blythe, light relief, May Issue

Category: Light Relief