Distractions by Martin Royackers SJ, Volume 14 #3

Armed with Flip Charts and Markers

The fastest growing industry in Jamaica is security. Business is booming in building grills and locks, breeding guard dogs and providing night watchman services. The next fastest growing industry, I am convinced, is facilitation: animation, rapportage, human resource consultancy and various other instances of intervention into dysfunctional institutions. Jamaica does not intend to be left out of the benefits of group process, which North America has enjoyed for so long.

Jamaica's fastest growing industries are not so different from each other as they might seem at first glance. Neither is a very productive use of economic resources. Both involve throwing up defences against the looming social chaos that results from the loss of common values and a morality of commitment. And both result in considerable personal inconvenience: laboriously going through four padlocks and one locked door, as I do every morning, and sitting through a small group session to share my feelings about the vision statement rate about equally on my scale of personal enjoyment.

Everybody seems to want vision statements these days. For several years I was chaplain at a Canadian university, where the Student Services Division, after long hours of meetings, came up with a vision statement based on the "wellness model." Student Services were to promote wellness on every level of the students' beings. My own mission was spiritual wellness. I never really subscribed to this vision statement, given our infralapsarian condition of spiritual diseasedness.

I have walked into hospitals and seen vision statements, apparently designed to fit a five-by-eight-inch frame, posted on the wall. I have had modest editorial input into the efforts of charitable organizations to arrive at vision statements. And I have sat through what feels like an eternity of meetings of religious communities in search of a vision, out of which succinct and moving statement will flow a great river of goals, objectives and programs. As Qoheleth noted, "Into the sea all rivers flow, but the sea is never full."

If such modestly stated institutional aims as Feed the Hungry, Heal the Sick, Teach the Ignorant or Love Your Neighbour are insufficient to give a visceral sense of purpose and unity to an institution of service, what can a neological collection of earnestly phrased objectives do?

I don't want to make light of the difficulties of achieving group unity and harmony. We live in times when everyone's feelings and opinions are important. It must have been easier to get the job done in less sensitive and participatory ages. Ours is an age when social virtues such as generosity, forbearance, patience, forgiveness and self-forgetfulness have all given way to the increasing importance of self-assertion. Assertiveness training workshops do a much better business than patience and forgiveness workshops.

To the cadre of mental health professionals dealing with personal therapeutic needs has been added an army of highly paid communal health professionals, armed with flip charts and coloured markers, promising a sense of meaning and harmony in our working lives. We pay money to find out one another's Myers-Briggs personality types so that we can discover why we find the others so annoying. For a price, we can report to the large group what the small group feels. Whatever the price is, having a rapporteur take our every thought and write it in large print with a magic marker on a flip chart may well be worth it. It is hard to come up with good thoughts, but at least we can feel that they are important ones.

If I go along with all this, and even try to be generous about it, it is not because I believe in this sort of stuff so much. After all, even when I know other people's Myers-Briggs letters, they still annoy me as much the next day. I have no reason to suspect that others are any more interested in what my small group feels than I am interested in theirs. And if my thoughts are not heeded because of their merit, I am more than happy to let them sink into the oblivion they deserve, unrecorded by colour-coded markers.

I go along with all this as an exercise in the cultivation of virtues, such as the subordination of self to the common good. I don't claim a great deal of success in this cultivation, but I doubt that one is able to be facilitated into it. And if I occasionally murmur a protest as I head off to another group process exercise, it is only a remnant of untrained assertiveness, not meant for the ears of the rapporteur.

Martin Royackers SJ works in a rural development project in Annotto Bay, Jamaica. He was Compass's managing editor from 1990 to 1994 and is now its Jamaica correspondent.