The other day at work I was really chuffed for a couple of hours. Chuffed because I came up with a phrase that I was really pleased with. Only a couple of hours because I Googled my newly-coined term and found that it was not so new after all, and several places were already using it.
I don’t think it is necessarily getting harder to come up with completely new ideas, but it is getting a lot easier to discover that your new ideas are only new to you.
The term I came up with was ‘organisational jenga’. I was referring to a situation where we had somehow allowed everybody in one part of the department to leave before lining up any replacements and then managed to get most of the rest of the department to all go on holiday at the same time. I siad that we were playing a game of organisational jenga, where management keep pulling blocks/people out to see how far they can go before the tower/company collapses. It is always good to vent a little bit.
It turns out that quite a few training companies use the term organisational jenga for team building games that are supposed to show how an organisation’s many parts are all inter-dependent and removing one can adversely affect all the others and the totality of the structure.
Mind you, its a good name for a band.
