Bulldozer00's Blog

Engineering Councils, Master Engineering Groups, Centers of Excellence, yada-yada-yada. Has your company repeatedly formed and dissolved elite groups like these over the years? The purpose of sanctioning these groups is always well-intentioned, but always doomed. Why are they doomed? Because:

• they are always underfunded and, at the first hint of corpo financial stress, they are abandoned because they are an overhead expense group that doesn’t create or add value.
• all of the sitting members have real day jobs that need to get done in order to put money in the corpo coffers and food on the table.
• they don’t actively solicit input from the people who have to operate by their decisions – if they ever make any decisions and produce non-verbal output at all.
• they ignore input from non-members when they do get it – losing credibility and respect in the process.
• they never agree to a systematic method of making decisions when they are formed.
• they spend all their time in philosophical debates, with each elite member trying show how smart he/she is.

I could probably make up some more excuses for the repeated cyclical failure of elite councils, but I’ll leave it as an exercise for you, dear reader,  to add your own reasons to the list. Feel free to add your own thoughts on this via the comments section.

Each time the elite council idea is recycled, nobody seems to remember the failures of the past and the same unproductive group behavior emerges. Everybody but the BOTG (Boots On The Ground) innocently thinks that this time it will be “different”. I’ve participated in these elite groups in the past, but from now on, I’ll always respectfully decline membership when asked. The last time I was asked, I declined to sit on one of these boards (that’s exactly what they do – just sit) . However, I offered up my services to work on any specific and funded task that the group deemed important. Unsurprisingly, nobody has taken me up on my offer. Bummer :^)

So how can the elite council idea be successful and add value to an org? Just invert the reasons-for-failure list above. Even if you do manage to change the context from disabling to enabling, it still might not work but, at least it will have a chance.