I enjoy wandering into conference rooms. Because in conference rooms, people leave stuff on the whiteboard. Ideas, thoughts, discussions are often not erased at the end of the session.
This habit makes interesting reading for the post discussion observer. Especially if the discussion involved top management. Now that’s a sure way to feed the grapevine. If you want to start a rumor, get some executives in a conference room, scribble on the whiteboard and leave it there for all wanderers to read.
“Year end target: Reduce existing staff by 30% and add 50% staff offshore”(an actual line on a whiteboard somewhere). Just imagine leaving such an incendiary line on the whiteboard. Sit back and watch the morale plummet or even worse, watch some people leave in a what they think is a preemptive move. In the end, there was no such move by the organization.
Here is another quote I picked up recently from a left over whiteboard, “Crack the whip”. Ostensibly, it was listed a strategy to avoid failure. Frankly, it conjured images of a World War II Japanese prison officer intent on making the allies prisoners of war completing the bridge over river Kwaii.
What are the software developers to make of such a strategy?
I think people write on the whiteboard due to a few different motivations. The obvious one is that they are thinking as they are writing in a discussion. Ideas are flowing, different people are speaking and someone must consolidate these points on the board.
When there is primarily one dominant person in the discussion, it is usually to enunciate, display the thoughts, and underscore the spoken word.
In any case, all useful whiteboard scribble needs to be transferred to the computer or a notified or I threaten to make a collection of them and publish a book filled with leftover whiteboard scribble.
This entry was written by , posted on December 29, 2005 at 1:58 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.