The mushy quality of the Big Ideas that came out of the summit - the cliches, vague motherhood statements and the bleeding obvious - was not the fault of the summiteers but these management consultants.
Of the 10 facilitators, seven were professional management consultants, at least three formerly with McKinsey & Company. It is their business to turn concrete ideas into gobbledygook, and they did not disappoint.
Amid a flurry of paper, whiteboards, marker pens and Blu-Tack, clear ideas were churned up in the management jargon-generator and spewed out as empty slogans, "priority themes" and concepts worthy of little more than a PowerPoint presentation. It took until mid-afternoon on Saturday for a woman in our group, the media "substream" of the governance "stream", to cry: "I'm sorry but I don't get the difference between a concept and a theme."
This prompted a storm of pent-up fury from exasperated summiteers.
As The Economist journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge wrote in their book on the lucrative management guru industry, The Witch Doctors, such facilitators have infiltrated corporate life, and are the "new, unacknowledged legislators of mankind".
Their language is "remarkably flatulent … If you buy the argument that the lingo of management theory is the language by which … people run companies and governments run countries, then it's no small thing when that language doesn't make sense."
In Canberra, it was the journalists, creatives and doctors who were most peeved their good ideas had been "lost in translation". The business streams didn't seem to notice.
Exasperated with his recalcitrant mob on Sunday, the governance group facilitator, Tim Orton, a Rhodes Scholar, former McKinseyite and founder of The Nous Group management consulting firm, told them their Big Ideas needed to be reduced to a "slogan on a T-shirt by 4pm". It was close to the truth."
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