Grid.
I tried to picture what it would look like… how it would feel… how it would change me… Most of my coworkers had been through it, after all, and with the frequent mentions, mutters, and general banter about it around the office, GRID had become a sort of legend in my mind—a mythic, life-changing experience that would upend my core values and pump out a new and improved Murray.
What I got was exactly that, but also exactly the opposite. For one, I realized that I was already (unwittingly) practicing many of the organizational techniques being taught—I often felt like I was ‘cheating’ when I suggested tactics for solving the problems thrown at us when I thought: “How would I do this?” and found the question had almost always already been answered by “How does BIG do this?” What’s more, my GRID team (comprised of six, only one of which I could initially claim to know better than “stranger”) was especially well-inclined towards effective teamwork: we significantly outperformed the global norms and from the very get-go had an almost inconceivably fluid, healthy working dynamic. (Sheer luck, we supposed.) This dynamic would have been ideal had we been an actual workforce; the issue was we were trying to learn how to handle ourselves when things didn’t match the ideal.
In other words, I wish there had been more conflict. That’s not to say things didn’t get incredibly emotional or that any candour was spared in our evaluations of each other, just that we didn’t get to experience an especially broad range of possible conflict scenarios, and I think those would have helped prove GRID’s main learning points with proper practice to supplement the theory. I mean, I’m still having trouble thinking up potential improvement strategies to offer at least a couple of my teammates—I can hardly muster any surprising/meaningful advice to share with them. In fact, they are nothing short of role models and mentors—true, this is proof that GRID-type strategies work (because here they were being lived out), but not especially informative to me in an pedagogical sense. So I got to thinking “maybe this has less to do with GRID than it does the people who attend it.”
And then I got it… exactly it: people are the power. Reading this now I am embarrassed by how simple my revelation was, especially since this statement was uttered verbatim at least a half dozen times during GRID itself, it just missed my core until I’d lived it first-hand. I realized that the work I produce is as much limited by my skills and talents as is it my peers and relationships, even if, technically speaking, the code I write is typed unquestionably by my own fingers. Having made the connection on a personal level, I then saw why the yearning to build a thriving capital-C office Culture is so vital. It’s simply too important to leave up to chance, even if chance is where it all begins.
Murray Smith
