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Aug. 7th, 2013 07:58 pm
"I only put that in to make it hard!"
Today we did one of those corporate self-assessments meant to promote teamwork and satisfaction (I don't want to promote anything, but the first half of the name is notorious for having the highest orthographic-consonant-to-vowel ratio of any common English word) and it was actually pretty enjoyable. It helped greatly that the group was selected from a population that is among the most engaged and least cynical in the institution (i.e. members volunteer committees) and no one took it too seriously. The moderator called out the various "themes" (i.e. areas of ability) while we raised our hands and when she came to the one I nicknamed "Bookworm", I got a laugh by jeering, "Imagine that! All these people who work in a library raising their hands at the "I like to read one!"
In general, the designers did a pretty good job of disguising the correlation between the questions and the results, but there were some howlers: I responded "Strongly Agree" to the question which asked me to rank the likelihood of spending more than five hours a week mulling things over in my mind and then my personalised results on the "Braniac" theme included the line, "You probably spend at least five hours a week deep in thought." NO SHIT. There were a lot of comparisons to astrology but that's unfair, since you aren't assigned a star sign based on a series of questions meant to illicit what star sign you think you should be.
The similarities in fact stem from how the "themes" are always couched in the most favourable terms possible, just as horoscopes generally are. (Unless you're the Onion, you don't get a lot of repeat readers by harassing them about their flaws every week.) It actually agree with the reasoning behind it--it makes people much more amenable to discussing them--but I can't resist "translating" them into their common names. So "Communicator" becomes "Blabbermouth", "Achiever" is "Type A", and so on and so forth.
It made me think how surprising it is that no one has ever produced a test like this based on shtetl archetypes. I'd think you'd get a lot of people shilling out to discover whether they were a makher, a luftmentsh, or a shlemihl. And the illustrative stories! Instead of these dry anecdotes from actual boring people, you'd have the whole rich vein of Yiddish humour to draw from. Too bad I didn't get any of the "Actually-gets-shit-done" themes in my top five, so that will end up being someone else million-making idea.
In general, the designers did a pretty good job of disguising the correlation between the questions and the results, but there were some howlers: I responded "Strongly Agree" to the question which asked me to rank the likelihood of spending more than five hours a week mulling things over in my mind and then my personalised results on the "Braniac" theme included the line, "You probably spend at least five hours a week deep in thought." NO SHIT. There were a lot of comparisons to astrology but that's unfair, since you aren't assigned a star sign based on a series of questions meant to illicit what star sign you think you should be.
The similarities in fact stem from how the "themes" are always couched in the most favourable terms possible, just as horoscopes generally are. (Unless you're the Onion, you don't get a lot of repeat readers by harassing them about their flaws every week.) It actually agree with the reasoning behind it--it makes people much more amenable to discussing them--but I can't resist "translating" them into their common names. So "Communicator" becomes "Blabbermouth", "Achiever" is "Type A", and so on and so forth.
It made me think how surprising it is that no one has ever produced a test like this based on shtetl archetypes. I'd think you'd get a lot of people shilling out to discover whether they were a makher, a luftmentsh, or a shlemihl. And the illustrative stories! Instead of these dry anecdotes from actual boring people, you'd have the whole rich vein of Yiddish humour to draw from. Too bad I didn't get any of the "Actually-gets-shit-done" themes in my top five, so that will end up being someone else million-making idea.
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