Posting's been a bit slow this week, as I've been ridiculously distracted by an upcoming conference this weekend.
On the plus side, if anyone cares to hear my thoughts on inter-professional differences in communication and conflict, I'll be speaking on it Sunday morning at 8:30am at the AABB meeting at the Boston Convention Center.
Normally my public speaking style is fairly laid back and has some improvising....but as I haven't been able to string too many coherent sentences together for the past few weeks post-baby, I'm a little nervous about this talk. Thus blogging time has turned in to "practice your talk" time. I'm hoping that winds up being a good trade.
Any prayers/good vibes/happy thoughts would be appreciated.
Also, you'd like my talk. I use the sentence "so this is a little kumbaya, why should care in the real world?".
I think that sentence should be used in all talks about how to get along in the workplace.
I also raise the idea that diversity of thought is an incredibly under recognized aspect of diversity, and that's not a good thing.
I think that idea should come up in every talk where the word "diversity" is mentioned.
Best of luck on your talk. And prayers too.
ReplyDeleteIf you can get across the "diversity of thought" concept, you'll do very well indeed.
Sometime during my adult lifetime, diversity has come to mean "We all think the same," and that's deeply unfortunate.
YES.
DeleteThat's why I included the point. It's stunning how often diversity gets talked about, and then when you broach the subject of "hey, maybe we'd get better solutions if we made sure there were lots of different opinions in the room" you get "oh, that's hard".
In our field, the conflict has come between the medical people, who drift toward dark humor about the clients (neurologists the best/worst), and social-work/psychology types, who find this offensive. Though employed as the latter, I think like the former.
ReplyDeleteIn work-world interactions, the social workers gradually come over to the thinking of the doctors, as they gradually realised that these were not hateful people who despised their patients.
Yet in the rule-making world, the social workers have largely won the day. We have to speak in approved ways now, and conferences often have a time of public confession by the presenters who reveal that they used to have terrible attitudes, but now have learned better. Camp meeting, except without the music.
I worked really hard to keep my "here's how we should relate" part strictly evidenced based.
DeleteI despise the camp thing, which is why I directly reference kumbaya. It also makes me laugh.