So, this whole Elton Sawyer business, eh? It landed on our desks a while back. Some big cheese somewhere read a book or went to a seminar, I reckon, and suddenly, Elton Sawyer was the only name anyone would utter in meetings. It was meant to be this magic bullet, you know? The thing that would sort out all our project mess.
They rolled it out with a lot of fancy PowerPoints. “Streamlined!” they said. “Synergy!” they proclaimed. “Game-changer!” I heard that one a lot. Honestly, I just wanted to get my actual work done. But no, first we had to learn the “Elton Sawyer Way.”
The Grand Unveiling
First week was all training. Hours of it. We learned about new charts we had to fill, new meetings we had to attend (because we didn’t have enough of those already, right?), and a whole new lingo. Stuff like “Sawyer Sprints” and “Elton Envelopes of Excellence.” I’m not even kidding. My to-do list just got a new item: “Understand what an Elton Envelope of Excellence is supposed to be.”
The idea, as far as I could tell, was to make everything super visible and trackable. Which sounds good on paper, I guess. But in practice? Oh boy.
Getting Down to Brass Tacks (or trying to)
So we started trying to use it. My first task under the Elton Sawyer regime was something simple. Something that usually took me, say, half a day. Well, first I had to:
- Log it in the new Elton Sawyer portal (which was slower than a snail).
- Break it down into “micro-tasks” as per the Sawyer method.
- Assign “effort points” (whatever those were).
- Then, attend a “Pre-Sawyer Huddle” to discuss the micro-tasks.
By the time I actually started the real work, it felt like I’d already run a marathon. And the portal! It crashed. Twice. Lost all my micro-tasks. Had to do it all again. Pure joy.
And the meetings! We had “Daily Sawyer Scrums,” “Weekly Sawyer Summits,” and “Post-Sawyer Post-mortems.” We were spending more time talking about doing work than actually doing the work. I remember one “Sawyer Summit” where we spent an hour debating the correct color-coding for tasks in the portal. An hour! For colors!
It wasn’t just me. You could feel the quiet desperation around the office. People were trying, bless ’em. But it was like trying to swim through treacle. Everything took longer. Simple communications got tangled up in Sawyer-approved channels. The “visibility” it promised just turned into more screens for managers to stare at, wondering why the pretty charts weren’t translating into actual results.
The Slow Fade
Funny thing is, after a few months of this chaos, the Elton Sawyer talk started to quieten down. The fancy charts got updated less. The special meetings started getting “rescheduled” and then just… forgotten. We sort of, organically, drifted back to doing things in ways that actually, you know, worked. Some bits of Sawyer stuck around, mostly the annoying jargon, but the hardcore stuff? It just kinda fizzled out.
I guess someone else read a new book. Or maybe the big cheese who brought in Elton Sawyer moved on to a new project, to spread “excellence” elsewhere. Who knows?
My takeaway from the whole Elton Sawyer saga? Well, let’s just say I’m a bit more skeptical when someone shows up with a shiny new system and a PowerPoint full of buzzwords promising to change the world. Sometimes, the old ways aren’t so bad, especially if they let you get your job done without needing a decoder ring for the instructions.
