Thinking about this just makes me feel so jaded and exhausted, knowing what little we've been able to accomplish here, and knowing how much time and energy I've put into trying.
But now you understand the magic of human group bureaucratic dynamics!
That was hard won knowledge!
Or hard-taught behavior anyway. I am on an Edu-committee. During meetings, most people adopt what I call "committee voice," which is a particular tone of voice and way of speaking that people use when in meetings. Everything is very neutral, and it's critically important to focus on paradigms related to planning and maximizing our impact. Sorry, we can't talk about those code violations; they aren't part of today's agenda, though we can certainly form a sub-committee to investigate your suggestion that they're serious. Dan? Can you look into that?
This approach pretty much guarantees that nothing meaningful will ever be accomplished by the committee. The troublemakers never use that tone. It's how the others can identify them as such in order to marginalize them and then blame them when OSHA starts imposing fines for code violations. But the troublemakers use their confrontational speech habits to secretly identify each other as the ones to talk to after the meeting in order to figure out a way to get stuff done behind the backs of the other ones. Thus, they avoid problems with OSHA (and of course, any credit therefore, but troublemakers aren't usually terribly competitive in the committee environment, anyway).
