Let Sleeping Frogs Lie

You have to love when meetings are done via conference call. You don’t have to go to a conference room, you don’t have to leave your computer, and thanks to the vital “Speakerphone + Mute” dynamic duo, you can actually continue to do regular, productive work instead of scribbling on a notepad to prevent your hand from falling asleep.

Especially in a presentation-type call, where your input will be minimal, your attention span can wane. Now a few months back we explained how dangerous it is to leave your desk on such a call via the Off-the-Chain Quotient, and while 36 people mean I could have taken over 34 billion steps away (don’t tell me the formula’s flawed), I stayed glued to the chair, getting work done and drifting out of conference call cognizance.

Until…

The call was an all-hands meeting designed to explain upcoming corporate policy standard changes. There’s a lot of ‘em and they’ll be here soon (changes, not meetings). This is why the call was being held. And while we may or may not have known how dramastically it was all going to happen, we know now.

And to think I almost missed the speaker’s analogy.

He compared it to boiling a frog. Yes, boiling a frog. From a logical standpoint, the analogy works. If you were to put a frog in a pot of boiling water, the frog would immediately hop out of it, saving its own life and leaving you with only a mildly scorched amphibian. But if you were to place a frog in a pot of lukewarm water, and ever so slowly increase the temperature on the stove, the frog will detect little change, and for no other reason that humans are smarter than frogs, will die an eventual scalding death. (If Peter King wrote this blog – I’d guarantee you a “croak” joke here.)

Regardless of what corporate overhaul changes we should see in the coming months, there is one question of mine that the speaker failed to answer for me, now paying acute attention:

Who the heck would ever think to boil a frog?

Clichés and saying have to have some basis in order for them to become clichés and sayings, don’t they? That means at some point in recorded history, someone saw that the “ease into a crisis” method of gradual change was similar to something he had either once done or at least witnessed. At some point, a frog was boiled under two highly scientific experiment variables – by shock and by awing into submission, and that guy was a part of it. And it’s not like this is one animal-masochist leading this conference call – this is on Wikipedia, for crying out loud.

And what’s more, apparently in crisis management, the boiling frog theory is used “to illustrate a slippery slope argument.” Needless to say, a slippery slope is another place a frog would prefer not to be.

Run, Kermit, Run.