"Mandatory Interesting Discussion" Is an Oxymoron

You can have "compulsory" or "nuanced," but not both

agree to disagree

One of the tedious tasks I pushed off into the winter break was the completion of my mandatory anti-harassment training course. This is a collection of online videos and quizzes that we are required to go through on an annual basis, though I’m not sure what level of requirement that is. It takes most of a morning to slog through if I put it on my second monitor and do other mindless tasks on my primary monitor while it plays.

I say “other mindless tasks” because the training really requires essentially no active thought. The video scenarios are essentially the same from one year to the next, but even if they weren’t, the questions asked on the quizzes are stupidly easy. They’re generally of the form:

A coworker comes to you with a concern about an interaction they had with a third party. Should you:

A) Behave like a decent human being with reasonable social skills

B) Be a complete dick

C) Be an absolutely staggeringly colossal dick

The whole business is really an insult to the intelligence of everyone involved.

We were grousing about this at happy hour one week, and somebody said something along the lines of “It doesn’t need to be this stupid,” but the sad fact is, it actually does. The whole set-up of mandatory required training for all employees pretty much requires that the training materials be really incredibly dumb and obvious.

What my colleague meant was something along the lines of “You could invent more interesting scenarios, about which you could have an interesting discussion,” and I think that’s probably true. At least, it’s true if you were doing this as an academic exercise, or with a group of people who were voluntarily choosing to be a part of this with an eye toward having an interesting discussion.

But in order to have an interesting discussion of issues relating to social behavior in a work context— something with an actual back-and-forth that requires people to think through their opinions— you would need to invent scenarios that are genuinely edge cases, in which two reasonable people might look at the same woodenly-acted video clip and come to different conclusions about how to interpret the behavior of the characters. There needs to be nuance and ambiguity to have real discussion, and that necessarily means introducing some uncertainty into the final consensus. Or even whether it would be possible to reach a consensus about the proper interpretation— with true edge cases, it’s entirely possible and appropriate for a discussion to end up at “We’ll have to agree to disagree.”

That is not, however, compatible with the idea of doing this at scale, as a mandatory exercise for all employees. Particularly not on an issue as emotionally charged as the acceptable bounds of workplace behavior, and not in the all-or-nothing atmosphere of modern American politics. Trying to set up a “training” based on cases that have enough ambiguity to be fodder for discussion is almost asking to create problems that didn’t already exist by getting people with massively incompatible worldviews into a room to fight with each other.

This is closely related to the issue of why lawyers are so frustrating, namely that the “correct” answer not only isn’t clear, but isn’t in the power of anyone involved in the discussion to determine. Whether some edge case is inappropriate in a legal sense is ultimately something decided by judges after lengthy and expensive litigation, and the whole point of the exercise is supposed to be to avoid lengthy and expensive litigation.

“Agree to disagree” is the appropriate place to end up in for the kinds of edge cases that make for genuinely interesting discussion, but that’s something that requires a certain level of detachment from the subject, a collective buy-in to treating it as an academic exercise. I don’t think you can really get that in a non-voluntary activity, though unless you do some really aggressive viewpoint sorting ahead of time, to avoid putting people with deeply held but diametrically opposed views in direct conflict.

Which is why any mandatory training program will almost inevitably be an insult to the intelligence of any reasonably functional adult subject to it. The case studies have to have thunderously obvious correct answers (ideally at a level that can be put in multiple-choice quiz form), allowing the institution to discharge their legal obligation in a way that doesn’t end up with employees being more angry at one another. If it leaves many of them grumpy about the stupidity of time-wasting bureaucratic mandates, well, that’s just the cost of doing business as a professional administrator.

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You might think it would be easier to get the necessary buy-in in an academic context, but I suspect it’s actually worse here. That’s a different rant, though; if you’d like to see whether I’m ever foolish enough to type it out, here’s a button:

And if you want to disagree (agreeably or not), the comments will be open: