Humour

The Second Law of Chai Service

Picking up the thread from the last meeting, The Second Law of Chai Service evolves in another closely fought Baffle skirmish, writes T A Balasubramanian

You, Papyrus Bytewala, the tolerant and tireless Chief Information Officer, are sitting, by special invitation, in a meeting where Fin Fina, the unrelenting Chief of Finance, and Gulabi Manpowa, the gritty but gregarious Head of Human Resources, have gathered again with their assorted juniors to engage in Code Clash. This is a new tussle over payroll inputs to your company’s accounting system. The issue under fire has something to do with pinning down who is responsible for putting in the right accounting codes, so Brando Bhatt, the chattering marketing man, has wisely stayed away from it all. For once, you, the much-harassed CIO, are happy to be a bystander, willing and able to help the victor in Code Clash.

Let’s start with a recap of the formula called the Law of Chai Service, which was introduced last week. Recaps are going to be critical in this session, so you should follow this thread closely.

In the earlier Law of Chai Service (hereafter called the First Law), we found that the length of time of a meeting in hours is directly proportional to the square of the number of attendees, plus the time spent exclusively sipping chai. Or, H = k*P squared + C, where H equals time in hours, k is a constant that varies with the culture of the company, P equals the number of people at the meeting, and C is the time spent drinking chai.

The P is squared for a reason. This is because of the phenomenon called useless recaps or comment chain perpetuation. Consider a typical meeting scenario: a person, say Gulabi, makes a comment. A second person, such as Brando, makes his own comment and also recaps Gulabi’s comment. Each subsequent person, like Fin Fina, also makes a comment plus a recap on each prior comment. Therefore, recaps are vital for the health of a meeting, since they waste time very effectively.

Now this can be mathematically pinned down. With P people, the total number of comments is P + (P - 1) + (P - 2) ... + 1 or the sum from 1 to P. The formula for this summation is P * (P + 1) / 2. This is about half of the P squared in the law. After this first round of recaps on comments, the need to recap previous comments drops by half with each subsequent round, mainly because of boredom. If the first round is P * (P + 1) / 2, the second round will be P * (P + 1) / 4, the third will be P * (P + 1) / 8 and so on. Eventually the recaps on comments approach zero, and the whole series approaches the P squared of the formula.

Time to move on to the discovery of the Second Law of Chai Service. Gulabi and Fin, though different in nature, are both ferocious corporate fencers, easy to anger and slow to forgive, with infinite memories for trivial details that even a computer might garble, but not these two. They have, however, fenced carefully in the past and obviously do not wish to do irreparable harm to each other. Hence, their approach is one of territorial protection and fake blustering, interrupted by chai sipping, but with a minimum of actual thrusting or blood-letting. Both want to get their own way, but do not wish to be blatantly abrupt or dogmatic, since that would have been detrimental to the ultimate objective, which is to enjoy the sport of corporate fencing, especially on display in meetings.

Observing their delicate verbal duel, with appropriate comments offered up by their juniors, the Second Law of Chai Service becomes clear: all important decision-making occurs no later than halfway into the meeting, allowing extra time for chai. The formula is D = 0.5*H + C, where D is the time to reach the decision, including all the in-between recapping, H is the total length of the meeting, and C is the time spent drinking chai.

It comes as no surprise, and is probably intuitively obvious, that normally the first half of a meeting is used for a recap of the previous meeting by one of the juniors formally assigned to record the minutes. This is followed by jockeying, posturing and establishing the fact that each participant fully backs the position of his or her boss by repeating their exact words. Chai is served at this point. Drinking chai helps people mull over the many useless points that accumulate in a meeting, and it also helps in generating more accurate useless recaps, since tea stimulates memory. It also gives everyone a chance to spend time in apparent productivity but with nothing being done.

Junior attendees strive desperately to show how smart they are by drinking their chai too soon, while the older, more senior, participants use the time to sip slowly, pausing to ask a few questions as if absorbed by the proceedings, then they go back to a few more sips. Future research may show that no one hears anything that is uttered in the first half of a meeting, because each person is deciding what to recap and figuring out what it is the boss really wants to hear. In other words, nothing of any real value takes place, except chai consumption.

This meeting takes a total of three hours. While Fin and Gulabi are engaged in Code Clash, they validate the Second Law by apparently reaching a mutually agreeable decision after 90 minutes. The next 30 minutes go in deciding where and how the codes will be entered, followed by 30 minutes of recapping the previous 30 minutes, and a further 15 minutes get used up in a session of chai drinking with general notes being exchanged about what has just been decided in the last hour.

In the last 15 minutes, you, Papyrus, the bystander, get an independent recap of the proceedings of the recent past from one of Fin’s juniors, who has been assigned the task of writing minutes on the spot. There’s no point telling Fin that a recap is not necessary since you happen to be present physically in the room, and in any case he is bound to send you a memo with the minutes before the end of the day.

Fin believes in accounting for, recording and playing back every detail of every minute of his presence at every meeting, and no power on earth can dissuade him. Meetings and minutes were designed for Fin Fina, like water was designed for fish.

[next week we explore The Third Law of Chai Service]