This is (part of) the story of one of my workplaces, the one that’s a huge hulking institution, we’ll call it Merde U.  Some one on the top floor of the important persons building, someone with real power, has decreed that the institution needs a shake-up, a bit of restructure.  Nothing wrong with that.  I like change, especially if it means improvement of function, form and outcomes that benefit all stakeholders.

Enter a huge multi-national consulting firm, we’ll call them Zealotes (see above - akin to the Autons from Doctor Who), to undertake the restructure.  Nameless, faceless youths, drapped in expensive wool suits with more flyer-miles than a Paris Hilton set of travel-trunks. They’ve held countless briefing sessions, mapped workflows, adjusted workflows, created incomprehensible brick diagrams with pretty colours, made inconvenient staff disappear and elevated others to lofty heights.  Most disturbing, they have plundered every Powerpoint Template ever conceived and force unfortunates to endure them in some strange indoctrination I have as yet avoided.  All of the Zealotes impart words of power which converts are encouraged to remember and invoke.  What are those words?  I can reveal they are - ‘twenty-ten’.

Now at Merde U, when you pass people who have been indoctrinated, they are as Stepford Wives, blank of face with eyes glazed over and they utter the words of power ‘twenty-ten’ in a monotone drawl.  I’m not sure how the words of power really work but I think you have to be indoctrinated before they do work because they are having no effect on me whatsoever.  In fact I just evoke a few of my own words of power.  I’ll let you guess what they could be.

... this story will continue in The Zealotes Strike Back - coming soon (unless they convert me first) ...