Hi, Leigh:)

Well, I got past your extremely graphic description of rotting food and am darned glad I did:)   The message in this entertaining post is pure gold.

I was reminded of a time when an organization experienced significant financial issues, eventually going into bankruptcy.  I was responsible at that time for the management development, organization development, and training functions, so I had a healthy budget.

This was a few years ago, so the major components almost always involved large amounts of money for hotel ballroom meeting space, food services, hotel rooms, and other costs related to bringing folks together for periods of time from one day to one week or more, from different parts of the country.   Depending on the division of the organization, transportation costs were either a facility or my responsibility.

When things deteriorated, we were "encouraged" and then directed to cut costs.  Two things stand out for me in this:

1)  I was and continue to be very oriented toward supporting the larger picture, so I followed directions and even occasionally exceeded the request to reduce costs and eliminate items from the budget which I controlled.

This made me feel very affiliated with the organization, since I was sacrificing some things I felt strongly about and enjoyed doing for the greater good.

This also aggravated the snot out of me, as I observed others who made different choices and insisted on protecting their slices of the pie.

The psychological dynamics and resulting emotions are important as we consider how we respond to a crisis.

2)  The cost-cutting, while painful and only partially effective at reducing our overall problems, did result in my focusing on alternative ways to provide development and training to the groups with which I worked.   This resulted in our organization becoming much more oriented toward online training and meeting before these became ubiquitous in the workplace.

The silver lining in facing this situation had several threads:

1)  Money saved for the organization through reduction of expensive employee development strategies.

2)  More effective and less disruptive, but newer ways of developing employees employed.

3)  My personal skill set exploded past stand-up facilitation of training and meetings to include becoming comfortable navigating the online environment, in advance of many others in my profession.

Thanks for a very interesting and thought-provoking post:)

John