The unbearable heaviness of being Welsh

Eight booklets? No, just four, twice.I'm not Welsh, but the title of this post refers to a reflection that to do business in Wales seems to carry a painful overhead.

Over the last couple of years I've been working with an excellent project called CIME which has been bringing the sort of business creativity support than can usually only be afforded by big companies to micro-businesses in the south west corner of Wales.


The project has just finished, and as part of the wind up, a pack was produced with a booklet on the different contributors with hints on creativity, plus three well-written booklets on creativity techniques and applications by consultant Derek Cheshire. These are very professionally produced and look extremely smart, and probably quite expensive.
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Anywhere else, that would be it. But because it's Wales they have had to duplicate all the documentation in Welsh. So instead of getting a pack of four booklets, you get eight booklets. Whatever your language, half of those are going straight in the bin. But more to the point, I can appreciate the value of the Welsh language, but I think to be so rigid about requiring all this kind of documentation to be bi-lingual is simply a huge waste of money.

It's fine if we are talking government forms - but it's a different matter for booklets from a project like this. There needs to be more flexibility, the option to choose whether to go for a single language or both, depending on your audience.
... in Welsh
As it happens, this project was funded by the EU, so had plenty of money for this kind of thing (in itself, perhaps an indictment of EU projects) - but, really, Welsh people. Would you rather your money was spent on duplicating every document in sight, or on services like schools and health? Just wondering.

For that matter, just think of the impact on the environment. Half these booklets you can absolutely guarantee are going to be thrown away without being looked at. That's really thinking of the environment, isn't it?

Since this was the finale of CIME, I'll leave you with a fun video from one of my sessions featuring the 'visual minutes' taken by a couple of enterprising art students.