Page 68 - Sorry, We're Not Hiring Any Visionaries Today

SORRY, WE’RE NOT HIRING ANY VISIONARIES TODAY
They’re called methodologists, and these people are brilliant. But a lot of these people tend to be very dry. They’re not the most exciting people in the world and not full of humour. They’re good at what they do. They know what they have to know, but they’re very inward-focused outside of that. Communica- tion seems insignificant. And ironically, I wouldn’t say everybody, but most of those people, I kind of butted heads with quite a bit. They didn’t get me, and I didn’t get them.
My role was to ensure everybody was moving along and keeping things on track. The art of the process was to see if I could understand the survey for myself. If it needed to be more straightforward, that led to me having ques- tions. Things like, “Why are we asking about this?” Thankfully, management encouraged me to ask a lot of questions.
A lot of this was just to get a basic understanding of myself, but I was also so fresh from the outside world. Why are we doing this exactly? I was thinking of myself as ‘Joe Canadian.’ I wondered if a question would annoy me. I try to understand why Statistics Canada was doing something good or why the pub- lic felt like they were being harassed.
After a while, it became a game to ask questions of the survey creators. So much of my life has been poking holes and seeing where things could be better. Many people in my department would test to see if the survey was functional, but I would take things three or four steps further.
We had this guy who went to university. He was a computer science major and had developed an application. Here I am with high school and a little community college, and I’m finding all these holes in his work. It became like a little game.
I didn’t poke holes to be negative or find frivolous things. I pointed out things that could severely hamper the survey. I presented myself as a consultant.
I used to say to people, “I will tell you everything, the good, bad, and the ugly about this survey. You can take my recommendations and accept them to make it stronger, or you could leave things as they are, and we’ll see where
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