Making it happen

Throughout my professional life, I have organized conferences, workshops, fairs, simulations etc and I have always been "accused" of coming up with the idea but delegating the details to others who made it happen. To some extent that is true. My modus operandi was to get a team together, develop the concept and work out the implementation details. It always worked for a number of reasons. There were usually detail people, conceptual people, artistic people and so on and synergistically we created something none of us could have done alone...and it is true that I did not do all of the detail work because I did not want to and there were always people who enjoyed that aspect of whatever program we were working on whether it was creating a web site or promoting a Canadian heritage fair.

About a month ago, the Superintendent asked me to spend our professional development day working with the staff on assessment and evaluation. I can't remember whether he gave me the topic or simply the task of working with the staff of both campus' I did what I always do, which was put together a team of staff members who I have worked with in the first few months, met and outlined an agenda, got their input based on their own experience, outlined who was going to do what during that day and gave them their marching orders. One person volunteered to open the conference with a task, another created a activity which he did with the group for the first twenty minutes and all of them prepared workshops. Not a problem. Everything worked according to the pattern I have established all my working life. Get a team together and make good things happen.

The divergence to the pattern happened in the next few weeks. I had no-one to pass the ball to in terms of the myriad details that traditionally a detail person would have been delighted to do such as creating name tags with group numbers on the back and workshop numbers on the front,negotiating with the boss for the appropriate facilities, deciding on what to serve for snacks and lunch and when to serve it, ordering and then testing out equipment, making sure rooms were open and equipment put in rooms, figuring out how to print out my power point with the lines where people could write, indeed even making a power point with fancy "do-dads" and detgermining where to set the podium for maximum exposure. I did sort of key a keynote address with presentation, table talk, presentation.

I knew the content...that was not a problem and I knew I could deliver that. The question was...could I make the conference professional in all the details?

Obviously, or I would not be writing this, the conference did run in a really professional manner without a hitch. I received tons of positive comments. I have no idea whether the content challenged the participants but I do know the details were professional and everyone did exactly what they were supposed to do.

As an aside, what is good about my job is that I am the in house consultant. Normally when you go to a conference, you might try out a few ideas as a teacher but when they fail you simply give up. In this particular case, they have me around all the time for follow through.

Anyway, back to the main point. I guess I even had a nagging doubt in the back of mind whether I could do the details and guess what...I did. So, the moral of the story is, it is not preferred style for sure, and the details are what caused me tremendous stress this week in all my presentations, but I proved to myself that when I have no-one to pass the ball to, I can do it! Nice feeling.

By way of celebration, what do you think I did...play golf or have a massage? If you guessed play golf you are right, but here is the twist. There is a golf course with lights so we could play in the dark. In fact, we finished at 11 pm. I assumed the golf course would be a mickey mouse par three which suited me fine. However, it was probably the most challenging golf course I have ever played. There was water on every hole, tons of sand, huge trees, monuments sticking out of nowhere and challenging greens. It was really target golf. What was beautiful is that with the lights, the huge banana and coconut trees were silhouetted against the night sky making for a surrealistic feeling. All the dots did not connect and you could forget momentarily where you were or why you were there.

This morning, I am off to a seaside town called Pattaya, where the owner of the school has decided to take us on a bonding trip. Should be fun so I had better feel my knapsack with my bathing suit and shorts and get going. Not quite what would happen at York or in public education. This is a week of firsts for me...giving a presentation on the white board and depending on the technicians to make that board work in appropriate moments, doing all of the details of the conference myself and not taking a trip paid for by my boss. Can life get any better than this? O yea, and playing golf at night. I have done that before, but never with lights. It makes it easier.