Working Knowledge

Your manager's email lands and you feel that familiar dread. The turgid pseudo-corporate speak that tortures meaning. The contradictions tied in knots. The redundant flourishes. The email that slimes your project plan with the performance of competence and will delay any and all actual work. This is the manager who counterfeited their way into the job through a combo of gob-smacking self-belief and near-total lack of insight. The counterfeit manager is not stupid. That's the first thing to understand. Stupid would be easier. Stupid can be worked around. The counterfeit manager is something harder: someone who has learned to occupy the space where knowledge should be without actually possessing it. They speak fluently. They reference the right frameworks. They arrive having done just enough preparation to sound like they've done all of it. In organisations that reward confidence over competence — which is most of them — this is a highly transferable skill. ------------------...

1.   Introduction 1.1.   A Personal Preamble As a Trade Union official, the members I represent often ask: What’s the point of this  mediation  I’m being pushed into? W hy  should I agree to attend? How is  this  going to help me achieve the justice I deserve? Following discussion of what can be expected in terms of process, I’m open about my own involvement with mediation – about my own  belief  in the value of the mediation process and the fact that I am a mediation proponent. Increasingly, it’s that reference to  belief  that gives me pause. I speak of belief – as though mediation were a matter of  faith . Mediation will help, we are told. But how do we know that it will? Where is the evidence - and what does it tell us? From the members I represent - people who are very often angry, distressed, unhappy – those are very fair questions to ask. So I am open with the members I advise, disclosing my own ‘prejudice’: that despite...