What about Dilbert? LO10560

Colston Sanger (colston@gid.co.uk)
Fri, 18 Oct 1996 14:54:09 +0100 (BST)

Replying to LO10530 --

Benjamin Compton writes:

> I've been a fan of Dilbert. I read his comic strip. I bought "The Dilbert
> Principle." I allow employees to post Dilbert cartoons in my office. I
> laugh when I read Dilbert. Dilbert clearly reveals the absurdity and
> foolishness that are often found within organizations.
>
> BUT. . .
>
> He doesn't present solutions to the problem he identifies. He leaves his
> readers with a sense of nagging dispair. The basic message of the cartoon
> is: Managers are inept, deal with it.

Yes, I also have this issue with Dilbert. The cartoons do seem to appeal
to the engineers and the software types. As Ben says, the basic message
and the appeal seems to be: Managers are inept, deal with it.

For me, this connects with a sort of world-weary cynicism on the part of
software people - a retreat from `politics' as they call it, by which I
think is meant practically anything to do with people, organisations,
customers - anything *except* technical toys. Perhaps it's a shell to
protect technical excellence.

But the cynicism, I think, is also about frustration. I hear this a lot. I
call it the `if only syndrome': *if only* the customer would make up their
mind/stop changingtheir mind'; *if only* management wasn't so stupid, etc.

Maybe there's a larger connection here with the notion of the `ego ideal'.
Howard Schwartz writes well on this (my view) in his Narcissistic Process
and Corporate Decay: the theory of the organization ideal (New York
University Press, 1990).

The notion I have is that, for software types, the appeal of technology is
the dream of a perfect world, perhaps a controllable or perfectable world,
beyond our everyday human frailty, our fallibility, our fleshiness.
Perhaps it's about being able to deal with disappointment, in a Kleinian
sense. A yearning for a world in which it all `just works'.

So... to my way of thinking there's a connection between:

- the youthful hopes of software types to really do a
good job, make a difference
- frustration and not being able to deal with the
disappointment that `the problem' is far messier
than they had imagined
- externalisation and discounting of that as `politics'
and a `people problem'
- retreat into the protective shell of cynicism.

What I think is missing here is *their* responsibility to look for the
tractable space, the sphere of influence, in which it is possible for them
to act.

Sometimes, I have wondered what a Dilbert cartoon from a manager's
perspective would look like. I suspect it might be similar, except the
roles would be reversed: `Software people are inept, deal with it' .

Err, sorry, this got a bit long.

Best regards,

Colston Sanger

-- 
colston@gid.co.uk
 

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