Re: Anonymity in Meetings LO2508

K.C. Burgess Yakemovic (kcby@gpsi.com)
Mon, 21 Aug 1995 23:00:13 -0500

Replying to LO2488 --

John Warfield mentions...

>Professor Henry Alberts of the Defense Systems Management College, Fort
>Belvoir, Virginia, used Interactive Management over a period of six years
>to redesign the U. S. Defense Acquisition System. In this iterative
>application, most of the work was done in the "non-attribution"
>environment that is traditional at DSMC--the program manager training
>college for DoD. This is a little different from anonymity, in the
>following sense. Because of the way IM is designed, it stresses
>responsibility and thrives on non-anonymity. On the other hand, because it
>is only used to work with complex situations, threat of immediate
>retaliation is absent, since the redesign process could not be
>accomplished in a half day or full day of work.

I have done a fair amount of "information capture" during meetings over
the years. (Translation: I take notes on a laptop... usually making them
available to attendees after the meeting.) I have many times been
requested to "leave off the names" -- not because I have previously
recorded people's ideas incorrectly... but because they did not want to
be responsible for them at some later date.

I found this interesting... since they obviously had no problem _voicing_
the idea... only in having people be able to pull up "proof" that they had
said it!

Perhaps, since many technology solutions _allow_ people's words to
be captured exactly as they "said" them... and kept "forever", it is the
technology which generates at least some of the demand for anonymity...

-- 
kcby

K.C. Burgess Yakemovic kcby@gpsi.com 4776 Village North Court phone/fax 770-395-0282 Atlanta GA 30338 USA

Group Performance Systems, Inc. "Helping people with people, through technology.... because the "soft stuff" is the _hard_ stuff!" (tm)