5 min read · My Compass – Direction North
The room does not explain itself. Somebody has to get close enough to ask what it is connected to.
I can’t look at a broken thing without asking what it’s connected to. That question is where everything starts for me.
None of that shows up from a distance. The real picture shows up when you are close to where the work happens, so that is where I go.
I am curious and rarely satisfied when something is finished. The questions keep coming long after everyone else has decided the problem is solved.
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The Form Nobody Filled Out Anymore
A knowledge database built to standardize the engineering process became bloated and ended up being built for the exception rather than the rule. Each new question was shoved onto the back of the form, over and over, with zero thought to organization. New jurisdiction setups were rarely required, while corrections to existing jurisdictions happened frequently, both funneled through the same lengthy questionnaire. Engineers stopped submitting updates and started gatekeeping information again. The problem the database was built to eliminate slowly crept back in through a different door.
Three minutes into a mock entry, I closed my eyes and said, “I wouldn’t want to fill this out either.”
Most designs get built from a guess about what should go in them, and that only works if people see it the way the builder does. Before you decide how complicated something needs to be, understand who is using it, how it will be used on a day to day basis and what’s required.
If you build for the exception instead of the rule, everyone pays for it. Eventually they stop using it and build their own workaround.
For the full story, read Built for the Exception (Read time 10 minutes).
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The Ninety-Second Conversation
A CEO was making his rounds and asked whether anyone saw something worth improving. I’d been sitting on an answer for five years. A skilled engineer spent three-quarters of every job hand-drawing street geometry before the real engineering could even start. Two completely different kinds of work had been jammed into one role, and nobody had ever split them apart. I knew how to fix it, but there wasn’t anywhere to move the drafting half of the work. Then the workforce shifted to an overseas model, and for the first time, that half of the work had somewhere to go. The conversation landed in under two minutes.
He smiled. I smiled back. Neither needed to say anything else.
The best diagnoses are finished long before anyone asks for them. They’re just waiting for a room that’s ready to use them.
For the full story, read Five Years in the Back of My Mind (Read time 6 minutes).
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What It Could Become
A decade of work history was sitting in the company’s systems, collecting dust. Every job, every client, every jurisdiction, filed and forgotten the moment it was closed out. What I kept coming back to was what all of it could become if it were finally mapped and connected in one place. What started as a knowledge base cleanup project turned into a plan to build an archaeological record. It would be a complete operational record, layered by discipline and searchable by geography, that would grow more valuable with every job added.
I looked at three scattered systems and saw one structure nobody had built yet, made entirely of parts the company already owned. Rooting around in old records leaves you hunting for the needle in the haystack. Making the data work for you shows you where the needle is located.
For the full story, read The Missing Connections (Read time 8 minutes).
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The Team Lead Pulled Up a Spreadsheet
Leadership assumed one team working in the new system functioned as expected. The team lead pulled up a private tracker she had built as a workaround. The team had already reverted to the behavior the company had spent years trying to eliminate. From where leadership was sitting, nothing looked broken. She was working out of a spreadsheet proving otherwise.
I stand where the work actually happens before I decide whether a system is working. A single field might size a job, feed a metric, and preserve a history at the same time. All of it is gone the moment someone from a distance decides it’s safe to remove.
A missing piece looks harmless from far enough away. Up close, that one field was feeding the metrics for three different groups, and cutting it broke all of them.
For the full story, read A Field Rarely Does Just One Job (Read time 10 minutes).
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Never Finished
All four of these came down to the same thing. Everyone else had looked at something, decided it was settled, and moved on. I kept digging.
That’s how I’m wired. I streamline. I connect dots. I look past the things everyone else has settled on and wonder if there’s more to it.
The people around me weren’t wrong and they weren’t lazy. Once something gets built, or filed, or set up and left running, people stop looking at it. It becomes the way things are, and nobody thinks to ask what else it could be.
To everyone else it looks finished. To me it never does.
Links to the rest of my Personal Operating System