As I read the Promising Practices article, I remembered something that happened when I took Dr. Keller’s Intro to Instructional Systems class. Several of us realized in horror that we are learning to be “the Bobs” from Office Space. If you haven’t seen Office Space, check out this YouTube clip:

The sad thing is, Office Space is HUGE for those of us who work in corporate America. We quote it all the time. We give each other gifts based on the movie – I even gave my boyfriend a red stapler for Valentine’s Day one year. Its so huge with us because it is so true to life.

The Bobs were the consultants who came into a high tech company (both of them were named Bob) to help resolve some performance issue. Pretty much everyone in the company knew the Bobs were there to figure out who was going to get laid off.

The Bobs diligently interviewed everyone in the company about what they did for work every day. But they really don’t understand the system that was the company. For example, watch this interview (can’t find it on youtube & can’t embed it sorry!):
http://odeo.com/episodes/24110829-Office-Space-People-Skills

So is that what we are learning to become? In the reading, David Chavis made me think this is what the profession of evaluation is like. He talked about how evaluators blame stakeholders when all they deliver is reports, brand themselves with buzzwords that don’t really mean anything, rely on their credentials as an author rather than a practitioner, maintain the mystery of the world of evaluators to maintain power of those who are evaluated, refusing to be accountable to anyone, and not understanding limitations from lack of knowledge about a subject that they are evaluating.

Yuck! I don’t wanna be a Bob!

I’ve never been interviewed by a Bob, but I’ve felt the downstream effect from their evaluations. My experience has been just as Chavis described about the bad evaluators, and just as Office Space portrayed the Bobs. Reports were produced that made it painfully obvious that the evaluators had not figured out the real performance problems, and then just like the Bobs a bunch of the wrong people got laid off.

One thing that draws me to this field is the opportunity to help people, the possibility of being what Chavis calls “part of the societal change process”. I want to find ways to eliminate the problems that keep people from working to their true potential. I think the issues on diversity pointed out by Ricardo Millet were very important. How can you perform a useful evaluation if your information filters prevent you from seeing all of the puzzle pieces necessary to paint the picture?

So, is it possible to pursue evaluation as a career without becoming a Bob?