Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Communicating the Obvious?

12:02 PM 12/14/2005
Something has really shifted for me. It used to be that I could satisfy myself by retreating to a coffee shop and reading or writing.

Now that is not satisfying. I feel that reading and writing are all part of the dream.
I prefer an unpleasant reality to a pleasant dream.The problem is finding the reality, but I know that what I've been living isn't real.

Work is satisfying, but I want to do more realistic work, what ever that may be?

I had the 'sudden' insight today of my pattern of not asking about important facts, and assuming that managers/technical experts know them.

Examples were from the NATO Summit meeting where I discovered from the white paper about the expense of group calling (which much later came as a surprise to my boss)
& the value of denormalizing the directory database to take advantage of bulkloading of spreadsheets (which the developer thought was not important, but he later told me that he wished that he had listened to me on that issue.)

How much time and money could I be saving my organization if I made sure that my insights were communicated to the people who can do something about it? I could have made a big difference in the 5 month NATO project on only those 2 insights alone.

Why did this awareness hit me today? 6 years later.