Dances With Books

I can give a brief answer to why dialogue does not work in my workplace in spite of the meetings we have. Before I do that, a little background. I just found this blog post on the importance of dialogue. Mark, who posted it at the Anecdote Blog, writes,

Dialogue provides shared meaning and empowers people. With the number of meetings in most organisations it is not unreasonable that we should expect high levels of shared meaning and empowerment…but this doesn’t appear to be the case. What is it that prevents our meetings from enabling us to engage in dialogue?

The answer is that meetings in my place are an experience in sensory deprivation. Most of the meetings, The Don speaks and reads from The Don's notes in The Don's laptop. The Don is a very important person, so The Don always has a laptop at the meetings. The rest of the meeting pretty much becomes restatements of the obvious from the Platinum Belle, some story from the dawn of time courtesy of the Old Ranch Hand, and just miscellaneous meandering. It is not exactly conducive to high levels of shared meaning let alone empowerment. If I have to send three to four e-mails to people to get them to do something, followed by reminding them at a meeting, followed by yet another e-mail, clearly not much empowering dialogue is going on. Given the number of meetings we have here, one would think that dialogue is going on (yes, I know, I still have to post about the last one, but we'll get there). My point in all this, besides pointing to a nice post and what looks like an interesting blog to add to my reader, is just wishful thinking. Why can't we do that? It seems it boils down to the "we have always done it this way: librarians go the meeting. The Don speaks. Librarians listen, nod, and maybe say something to fill the time. We are about to get up when the Cyber Cowboy brings something up as we are about to leave. And we leave." C'est la vie.