Lucy Kellaway: Laughter not all it’s cracked up to be
Earlier this month 100 senior managers from a well-known company boarded planes and flew to a destination in the middle of the US. Their mission: to laugh.
They gathered together in a hotel ballroom and were told by a German “facilitator” in a jester’s hat to start going “ha-ha-ha-hee-hee-hee”. Having mastered that, the managers trotted around the room laughing uproariously into the faces of their colleagues. As a finale, they had to lean over, pretend to pull the start cord of a lawnmower and give a great ho-ho-ho belly laugh as they did so.
This unseemly story was told to me last weekend by a close friend who had taken part in the compulsory laughathon. Just hearing about it made me feel embarrassed. Yet as he went on, I realised with deeper discomfort that this clever, sophisticated friend, with his first-class degree from Oxford, was not trying to tell me how stupid the course was, but how effective it had been. Apparently it had broken down barriers and the brainstorming session that followed was the most fruitful he had ever attended.
This left me confused. I had to admit either that this most stupid of courses was actually quite sensible or that my most sensible of friends was actually quite stupid.
Yet on further questioning, I found a third option: the course was stupid, and my friend is sensible, though was not in his right mind, and was therefore not culpable.
I was led to this conclusion by a small clue: apparently one person had refused to go along with the enforced mirth. That person turned out not to be an employee at all, but a consultant who had been working with the company on a big project. So he had a choice: if he didn’t fancy behaving like a primary school child, he could sit it out. The others, including my clever friend, simply had to go along with it. They had to believe
