Posted by
Jennine on Sunday, March 08, 2009 11:54:30 AM
Recently the Administration has employed an interesting forum to solve the most complex problems facing the nation. It's called, Let's Have a Summit. He calls together a large group of diverse people, many of whom have never met each other, and have no in-depth working knowledge of the problem to be solved. You know things like the economy and health care. Then he gives them an inspirational speech and sends them into breakout groups for a few hours and they bring back the answers to problems like the reform of Social Security, Medicare, tax policy, and health care. Built into these summits are lots of time for participants to come back and share their enthusiasm and gratitude for being part of this innovative process. When I watch this, I can't help thinking about one of his two autobiographies, which I remember were written before he had done anything or anyone had ever heard his name. The Audacity of Hope. Audacity is such a good word for these summits. It is audacious to think the greatest problems of our time can be solved in an afternoon. Brilliant, in fact. I wonder why no one has done this before.
Of course, I cannot help but remember the many similar meetings I have been involved in over my professional career. We didn't call them Summits, and the President wasn't there to cheer lead, so maybe that was why most of these were a colossal waste of time and money. We called them less grandiose things like strategic planning, which I used to think was pretty grandiose considering the outcome. In these less audacious exercises, we too were dealing with health care. On a much smaller lever, so maybe that was why it took us so much longer. For instance, we actually got stacks and stacks of material to read and absorb so that we were on a similar knowledge level to start the process. And of course, almost everyone at these meetings was actually involved in the provision of health care. We also took days rather than hours to come up with an outline of where we needed to go. Then we actually put together separate teams to flesh out and follow up on all the recommendations. We had follow up meetings and reports to keep us on track and see what was happening to all our work and great ideas. In spite of all the unnecessary time and effort, we still usually ended up with a huge document that sat in offices of participants with ideas that slowly withered and died. I bet most people who have ever worked in an organization of even a moderate size have been through this painful process as well.
Here's the genius of Obama's summits. The ideas will wither and die just like the ones that came out of the prolonged process, but he's saving us an enormous amount of money by limiting these exercises to hours rather than days and months.He gets to avoid his office and doing any real work for another day. And he gets lots of air-time showing the American public how inclusive and Presidential he is while playing Facilitator in Chief. Wow.