My 5 Days at Camp Lur'ning

Elementary, my dear Watson. To get to know customers really well! Through questions and a series of interactive group exercises, the workbook instructs us to gather evidence, formulate a theory, test it, modify it with the help of others, and craft a solution. Eureka! XBS has figured out how to make the scientific method fun.

Beyond the questions in the workbook there are no rules. We begin tentatively, looking for ways to get started. We network for a while, and come up with several people to call who know something about utilities and FP&L. Then Dave, who works in Rochester, has a suggestion. Rather than work competitively against the other groups, why not pool our resources and work together?

At that, I realize that XBS really is on to something. Internal competition is so much a part of corporate life that spontaneous cooperation is unusual -- or unheard of. Yet this group eagerly embraces the idea, and Dave goes off to find out which other groups are also assigned FP&L and suggest cooperative learning to them.

Day 3

I decide it's time to do a little sleuthing of my own. If I draw my teammates aside, will they tell me the same story about XBS that Camp Lur'ning promotes? I figure I'll start with Tamara, who already knows I'm at camp as an observer.

Tamara says she came back this year as a counselor because she was so sold on Camp Lur'ning after the first one last year. "The people of XBS are truly shaping the organization," she says. "I don't know where else that's happening in quite this way. And it's working: by any business measure, XBS is very successful. It's not fake. We're learning to make use of all our differences, not to suppress them." She sounds like the XBS Poster Grownup.

I decide to see if I can find a dissident movement.

When I'm finally able to corral a small group of XBSers without any corporate supervision, the results are very disappointing. Everyone believes in Camp Lur'ning.

Jane, a long-time Xerox employee, says, "XBS is not as regimented as it used to be. Our customers are becoming our clients and we're forming partnerships with them. It's more exciting to come to work."

I turn to Lyn, a 15-year veteran. She says, "We're hearing from our customers about how we've changed. We're respected now as true professionals. Internally, the biggest change is that the walls between management and employees are coming down."

I figure I'm not going to get employees on a week's vacation at corporate expense to grouse about their host. Anyway, it's time for the afternoon sessions. I decide to attend a workshop on alternative ways of learning offered by Paula Underwood, Keeper of the Wisdom for her father's tribe, the Iroquois. I follow the crowd to the meeting room.

There a scene as surreal as any I will ever see in corporate life meets my eyes. Picture a typical corporate conference room. No windows, beige plastic modular walls. A mind-numbing roar from the air-conditioning system. A few gray Formica tables and lots of maroon padded chairs.

Now add to that picture a Native American woman sitting on the edge of one of those tables, greeting us as we file in. She's taped on those corporate walls, with deliberate untidiness, pictures of all her animal friends. There's bear and beaver and mouse and all the others.

We are seated in a semicircle around Underwood. She is instructing us in the learning of her ancestors, the accumulated wisdom of more than 10,000 years of oral teaching. She relates it to scenario planning, peppering her remarks with tales about animal wisdom in days gone by. It seems that Native Americans believe that there is more than one right way to do things. She asks us to try to find at least six each time we are faced with a business challenge.

Underwood draws a wheel to signify the totality of the community. She describes four learning styles: the elk or buffalo, known for wisdom; the eagle, signifying inspiration and the big picture; the mouse, representing caring and nurturing the community; and the bear, meaning introspection. The point is that all kinds of learning styles are valuable and useful to an organization. And no decision should be reached until all perspectives are heard from.

Thinking of these animal guises can help us understand diversity in a more natural way. I've left my cynicism at the door; I can't help thinking that if the corporate types I've known displayed this kind of sensitivity to others' needs, the corporate world might actually be a good place to work.