You will hear five different people talking about seminars they have recently attended. For each extract there are two tasks

Man: There is a danger in business of not seeing the wood for the trees. And I’ve been feeling for some time that we are trudging forward with all the nuisance of why we would do what we were doing. So before we consider developing new products or services for customers, I want to find out more about the reasoning behind the development, the ideas and thinking of the systems. That’s what this seminar offered. Obviously I am not in R & D myself, but I want to be able to understand the underlying issues when the R&D people come and talk to me. The seminar made me realise how complex those issues could be and that’s why we have now appointed someone to look after that sort of thing for the first time.
Woman: Yes, well, I was quite surprised that how big effect a single afternoon session turned out to have. Afterwards, I’ve spent a few days thinking over what I have learned and talking it through with various colleagues, particularly on the IT team. I conclude we’ve been wrong to bring in a new sales target without altering anything else. So we set down and reworked people’s responsibilities, the definitions of their roles and tasks. Now I think the whole system works much better. And to think that I only went because I was feeling a bit rusty about the database, I want to spend some time trying out how to coordinate all the data we had on customers. It led me to realise how much more the sales staff could be doing if we rejigged their role.
Man: I was very glad I went to the seminar. As it is, it enabled me to get things moving ahead. If I hadn’t gone, I think it would have ended up calling in outside consultants, which would be an expensive way to get no more information than we could get by ourselves. But arranging for the HR manager to investigate our styles, expectations and intentions and presenting them in writing to the leadership team has worked out well for our purposes. I signed up for the seminar because l knew we needed to find out more concrete facts about how career patterns are shifting. We can’t control them, of course, but if we know more about them, we can at least anticipate what’s coming. They showed us some case studies, which were really quite similar to our situation.
Woman: We are in a business where it really is true that you have to keep running even to standstill. And market research keeps showing us that customers expect more and more. The seminar outline says it would cover ways to develop genuinely new products and services, which was exactly what we needed and it has proved useful. Now they have set up a dedicated cross-functional group to generate ideas and suggestions. I think we will start to see some quality results coming through once they are ready to release their findings. And that should give us some competitive edge we so badly need to gain without the expense of hiring an agency or taking on new staff whom we can’t accommodate.
Man: There’s certainly been quite a shift over the last few years towards measurement. It seems everything has to be quantified these days. We’ve been measuring an ever widening scope of aspects of the business. Nothing new for us about measuring what each and every employee achieves in relation to a great target of efficiency or achievement. The session I went to offered the opportunity to examine alternative ways of going about it. And it was as useful as it promised to be. In the spirit of consultation, I presented all the options on the intranet so people can look at it and then we will have a discussion phase. I hope it could work out because I don’t want anyone to feel any new system is imposed from above.