Maybe She WAS Wearing Prada!

Summer 2006

‘Have you seen the movie The Devil Wears Prada?’ he asked.

We were walking into the office of a media company pretty much anyone would know of to do a Team Management Systems accreditation.  Industrial design, open concept, lots of glass, coffee stations, fooze ball tables.  You feel cool just visiting.

‘Yeah, I’ve seen it; why?’ I replied.

‘Well, you’ll be working with her for the next couple of days’ he said. A simple statement of fact that painted a clear picture.  The brevity was incredible!

(If you haven’t seen the movie here is a clip that gives you a sense of Miranda).

He led us to the room we would be using and left us to do set up.  He came back a while later and asked, ‘Where will she be sitting?’

‘Oh, people can sit wherever they want,’ I replied.

‘NO, NO, NO they can’t’ he said with no room for doubt.  ‘She sits in the middle of the room and this person sits on her right and this person sits on her left.  I’ll bring her ice water and room temperature water in just before you start tomorrow.’  They were different brands of water!

‘Great, thanks; you got any name tents?’ I asked.

She swept in the next morning, right on time and nodded her approval.  I was fascinated!

We started the day off with an experiential exercise to illustrate one of the models important in understanding and using the Team Management Profile (TMP).  The exercise has a right answer that 95% of groups find.  With a hint, 99.9% of groups find it.

They didn’t.  Yikes.

So, we told them the answer.  Her response: ‘Well if we wanted that kind of creativity we would have outsourced for it’.

I wondered, if by chance, she WAS wearing Prada!

We kind of ignored that comment and navigated the eggshells the rest of that day but I couldn’t shake two questions nagging at me.  ‘How do these people work in this environment?’  ‘And why do they?’

She didn’t show up the next day.  We didn’t miss her.  The rest of the group was great.  A celebration dinner with my colleague that night was a mix of those nagging questions and WTF happened!  We laughed. I ate an artichoke for the first time.

Eventually those nagging questions showed up in a mirror.  I had some good answers.  Some of them still make sense…

And she’s probably still wearing Prada.