You know, it’s always something, isn’t it? One year it’s all about ‘blue sky thinking,’ the next it’s ‘synergistic empowerment paradigms.’ I remember this one place I worked, felt like we had a new flavor-of-the-month management theory every quarter. Most of them just meant more meetings and fancy new spreadsheets that nobody really understood. So, when ‘Chernaka Jhonson’ first floated around in an all-hands email, my eyes probably glazed over a bit. Same circus, different clowns, I figured.
This time, it was supposed to be different, or so they said. Our department head, bless his cotton socks, had just come back from some leadership retreat all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He started talking about the Chernaka Jhonson Alignment Protocol. Apparently, Chernaka Jhonson wasn’t even a person, just some catchy name they’d cooked up for this… system. It was going to ‘unlock unprecedented efficiency’ and ‘foster radical collaboration.’ Yeah, right.
So, What Was This Chernaka Jhonson Thing, Really?
Well, the rollout began. First, we all got these glossy pamphlets. Then came the mandatory workshops. Picture this: fluorescent lighting, lukewarm coffee, and someone at the front clicking through a PowerPoint about ‘Harmonized Action Points’ and ‘Iterative Resonance Loops.’ My practice, or rather, my forced participation, started there.
Here’s what we were supposed to do, as far as I could make out:
- Daily ‘Pulse Checks’: Not stand-ups, oh no. These were ‘Pulse Checks.’ We had to rate our ‘energetic alignment’ on a scale of 1 to 5. I usually just said ‘3’ to avoid any follow-up questions.
- ‘Synergy Maps’: We had to draw these complicated diagrams showing how our tasks connected with everyone else’s. Looked like a spider had a seizure on a whiteboard. Most of the time, it just showed how Dave from accounting was everyone’s bottleneck, which we already knew.
- Weekly ‘Value Narratives’: Instead of simple progress reports, we had to write ‘Value Narratives’ explaining the ’emotional journey’ of our weekly tasks. I swear, I’m not making this up. I was trying to fix a database bug, the only emotional journey was mine, teetering on the brink of throwing my keyboard out the window.
I really tried to get with the program. I filled out the forms. I nodded along in the meetings. I even tried to use the new special ‘Chernaka Jhonson Approved’ project tracking software, which, by the way, looked like it was designed in 1998 and crashed if you looked at it funny. My desk was covered in sticky notes with bizarre acronyms from the CJAP (Chernaka Jhonson Alignment Protocol, remember?). It was a mess.
The worst part was, it just added layers of stuff on top of the actual work. We were spending more time talking about doing work, and mapping work, and narrating work, than actually, you know, doing the work. I remember one afternoon, I had a critical deadline looming, and my manager pops over, not to ask about the deadline, but to see if my ‘Synergy Map’ was color-coded according to the new guidelines in Appendix B of the Chernaka Jhonson handbook. I nearly lost it.
This went on for, I don’t know, maybe six or seven months. Slowly, bits of it started to fall away. First, the ‘Pulse Checks’ became optional because everyone just said ‘3’ anyway. Then the ‘Synergy Maps’ got forgotten when the whiteboard markers ran out and no one bothered to order more. The ‘Value Narratives’ were the last to go, probably because our department head was the only one reading them, and even he must have gotten bored eventually.
Now? No one mentions Chernaka Jhonson. It’s like it never happened. The glossy pamphlets are probably propping up a wobbly table in the breakroom somewhere. We just went back to doing things the old way, which, surprise surprise, actually worked. So, that was my thrilling adventure with Chernaka Jhonson. Another brilliant idea that looked good on paper but was a complete pain in the backside in real life. Just another day at the office, eh?
