Lifeboat Exercise - Poem of the Week - Poetry, Prose, and Other Good Stuff

I’m one of those people that doesn’t like structured “fun” and particularly not the “lifeboat exercise”

Maybe you know the exercise I mean. It’s been around more or less as long as team building exercises have been a subcategory of corporate human resources topics. The “Lifeboat Exercise” is where you have space to save some of your team but not all. So some portion can go on to safety and some must be left behind.

I pretty much hate the lifeboat exercise.

For one thing, I find it hard to suspend my belief in the real world. I have trouble pretending that making some consumer packaged good is the same as trying to reach land from the open ocean.

And all you people who say, “it’s like being in a movie, you don’t need it to be real” or “it’s not real, it’s just to make a point,” might want to remember that, usually, at the end of the lifeboat exercise, someone loses their job.

Because that is how the modern corporate experience may work.

The other problem I have is that the scenario envisioned is so obviously unrelated to a corporate world.

I mean, let’s consider. In a lifeboat on the open sea, I am obviously going to want the people on board who are able to help row my raft somewhere. Say, the mainland. So get me those big-biceps men, please. And jettison everyone else. Because I would like to survive and thrive.

But out here in the real world, where biceps haven’t got as much to do with day to day success? Well, it is suddenly all murky, isn’t it? Who stays on board? Who goes? Who do we trail behind the raft, feeding them enough to keep them alive, just in case we need them? What if we do need those others, and not only the giant-biceps fellows? Who tells those who are stronger than ourselves that we just condemned them to death?

See? It all becomes quite Machiavellian, doesn’t it? Or, in more modern parlance, it’s so Game of Thrones.

Back to a corporate sense, the lifeboat exercise seems a odd, considering that no one’s actual life or livelihood must actually be sacrificed in order to make the next gone-viral marketing success sweep the globe.