200 Miles ’till next…

On a cross-country drive long-long ago (disclaimed only to insinuate I’ve become wiser with age) I invoked the “one more town” mantra with 1/3 a tank of gas. The map I carried indicated a 70 mile traverse to the next Motel-6; well within my Toyota’s range. What the map failed to illustrate was the impending elevation change, and I soon found myself climbing into the Utah tail of the Rocky Mountain foothills.

The problem soon unfurled, as I burned exceptionally more fuel with each mile of ascent. Even once aware of the conundrum, the lack of turnarounds left me no options or escape.

2500 years ago, a Chinese general (and the freshman business students who read him) warned against this. Sun Tzu, through his Art of War, waxed poetical about the importance of understanding “Terrain.”

How honed, managers, are your map reading skills? Does your data show you the information that could affect you, rather than just the information that does? Have you forgotten that a²+b²=c², viewed from above, looks like a line? Do you maintain the bush pilot rule of having enough fuel to get back from your destination without resupply, or are your strategies Cortez-like one-way trips? Do you know where to turn off should you decide to change your path, or are you locked into to terminal strategies from which there’s no escape?

Plan well, conquistadors of commerce. All I’ll say is that there are places AAA cant get to. Plan well, & travel safe.

The Pudding’s In the Proof

I didn’t do well in high-school algebra. Though I answered the questions correctly, I didn’t pass the tests. Because I didn’t show my work. I didn’t show my work because I wasn’t using algebra to solve the problems. I didn’t “get” algebra, and so I used long arithmetic, brute force cryptography, and intuition to arrive at my solutions.

The root of the word “solution” means  “to loosen” but also “to divide”, to cut apart. Chemically-speaking, a solution is a homogenous mixture, meaning the various parts have been cut together so completely, so interwoven that they are one; integrated.

By definition then, my answers weren’t solutions. They were just answers. They might have been correct, but they didn’t solve the problem. They circumvented it. I’d have to deploy my dead-reckoning from scratch every time rather than use the tool designed to efficiently arrive at the solution.

Like a mathematical proof, we must lead our organizations along parallel paths of understanding the answer, applying the solution, and making the application repeatable. Or by definition we’ve not created a solution, just provided an answer providing no stakeholder buy-in and developing no organizational memory.

Do your projects aim for holistic integration? Do you “show you work,” or provide just enough information so that others won’t build your competencies, threatening professional tenure? Do we launch projects, forgetting that the learning of that system must also be a part of the solution itself? And by doing so, what we you trying, or failing, to proof?