Ideals and actualities

In my days as a Buddhist lay person there was a scripture that was recited regularly in the monastery and meditation groups, "Lo, with the ideal comes the actual". Meaning that whatever our ideals and aspirations, reality seldom matches up to them. Our innate humanity means that, time and time again, we fall short, however much we may wish and try not too. This is certainly true in my personal life, but today I have been thinking about this within the institution that I work for.

My organisation has a vision for the future, an agenda for social change, a mission that is incontrovertible. Like most of my colleagues, these very things are what motivate and bind me to the institution. Today was a show day, an event at which various groups and departments from around the organisation came together to show off innovation and achievement. There was cake, lollipops, champagne and chocolate biscuits, plenty of posters and banners full of colour and statistics. The problem with much of it though was that the corporate jargon was so dense it was almost impossible to fathom what exactly the achievements actually were. Agile software development? For what? For whom? Leading the student journey? How?

Many of the stands represented departments that we know are struggling. An IT department that students complain about because either they cannot get through or the advice they receive is useless. An operations department that is under such strain that the workload in other places is increasing because of the mistakes that are made, everything has to be treble checked and corrected because there is no longer any certainty that it will be right first time. A marketing group that spends a small fortune on advertising and yet, by commoditising education, fails students who come unprepared. Yes, we should celebrate our successes, but we need honest discussion, we need to admit our failures, to acknowledge that there are problems and to find creative solutions to them rather than papering over the cracks with stock photo images.

Our leader came round the exhibition today, even had a word with me about the stand I was on, he is a busy man, a 1 minute pitch was all he was looking for at each stopping point. I did my best to represent our rather simple, not very corporate, initiative. What I would have liked to say was, 'look, see that stand over there, the people in that department do really good work but they are so overloaded that more and more is pushed back to us even though it is not our job. And that department over there launched a scheme to optimise computing in the organisation and has really messed up lots of people's work. The nice ladies on the stand over there are representing an organisational structure that is being systematically dismantled and the guys next to us are simply talking a lot of hot air'. But I smiled, defended my corner, and kept it short so that he could politely move on. Lo the ideal and the actual are nowhere near each other!