Shh! Stay calm and step away from the group project.

Just back up. It hasn’t seen you yet. There you go, gently does it. Keep quiet and don’t make any sudden moves.

OH GOD! IT’S SEEN YOU! QUICK! RUN! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!

On the face of it, the idea of a group project doesn’t really seem all that bad.

Gather up a gaggle of willing victims rubes dopes volunteers and set them to a task then watch, cackling, as it falls apart.

There’ll be a head of the group, responsible for making sure everybody has their act together. There might be someone in charge of communications, their duty to keep any members without server access in the loop, and maybe keep the wider employee base informed if the project carries a degree of “public interest”. The rest of the group will set about their roles with due diligence and vigour. Regular group meetings are scheduled and everybody will have something to bring to the table.

To volunteer, means to give of oneself freely. All group members will commit to this ethos and, in the course of time, the group will complete their project and the great undertaking shall be complete. The results, if successful, will be utilised to benefit the company and its employees.

And then, we all skip to the land of Narnia, with our friends Frodo and Dorothy. With a brief stop at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory along the way to pick up supplies.

Um.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? But, that’s not what’s going to happen.

The second law of thermodynamics asserts that any isolated system degenerates into chaos. Everything tends towards entropy.

In a group project, everything accelerates towards entropy.

The group leader doesn’t lead. Communications doesn’t communicate, so nobody is kept informed. Nobody shows up to meetings, partly because they are busy elsewhere, and partly because they haven’t been told about the meeting. (When people do, randomly, get invited to a meeting, it’s been so long after project start, they’ve forgotten what’s going because nobody’s been telling them anything.)

There will be one person, and one person only, working on the project outside of work hours. This will generate resentment among the other members of the group, who will then ignore the person working in their own time. This creates a resentment feedback loop until everybody’s pissed off.

Meetings will descend into chaos, but that’s a given in any situation, and the relevant topic will be the last thing on the agenda.

Whatever work does get done by the group, or most likely one group member, will be pared to the bone and then completely replaced with what HR wants.

This is pretty much the norm.

Anybody with any experience knows that “The Group Project” is a farce waiting to happen. So why does your employer keep doing the same thing over and over again? They can’t possibly be expecting a different result, can they?

Beyond a complete lack of self-awareness, there’s a number of reasons the group project might be considered a viable concept.

It’s, obviously, another one of those corporate ideas that qualify as “engagement”. A simple way to get hold of that juicy, corporate certification. “Look! A group project! They’re engaged! Please give us an award.”

A friend of one of the HR thingies might have gotten bored with working in retail, and thanks to the miracle of nepotism has landed themselves a job. Now they just need to be trained in their new role, and the results of a group project can be used to shore up the old chums’ inadequacies.

Once they’re ready, and in accordance with the company ethos on equal opportunity, their job role is finally advertised internally. Old pally-pal is already there, ready to go, and the employee base goggles in wonder at HR’s latest addition. Wooh!

What actually happens is, HR’s buddy-bud-bud has parlayed their training and additional knowledge gleaned from the group project into a much better job with a media software company. Oops! HR will frantically scurry about and find someone willing to fill a role that means they’ll be dealing with an employee base, that knows it’s been played for suckers.

The group project might also act as a front for, eventually, recovering employee data that was once lost in a skip.

The Group Project.

Just Say No!