From: Jasper
Date: Monday, July 30, 2007
Time: 01:30:11 AM -0400
Jean, …The Iago Discussion Board is the powerful truth-finding tool it is precisely because of the honest people who contribute what their unique backgrounds and talents allow them to contribute to a group effort. Where the goal is to find the truth, rather than to find evidence for or against O.J., different people are bound to have unique ways of seeing and doing things that makes the goal easier to reach. ……..By “easier,” I don’t mean less effort. I mean less wasted effort in following false trails. I used to get knocked down on my performance reviews at Ford as a sculptor because my supervisors thought I paid too much attention too engineering data too early in the development process to be more “creative.” They thought I “wasted” time trying to figure out which surface contours could work and which ones couldn’t while the design was still subject to radical changes. They thought that I should have hidden my early bad surfaces (with “professional” techniques) to make the clay MODEL beautiful from start to finish. They didn’t think I could because I never did. ………The struggle I had then to get most people to see what I was doing and why, is very much like the biggest struggle I have here. Being “creative” when the cost, material, manufacturing and engineering data set hard, real-world limits on what was possible on the production line ALWAYS added A YEAR OR MORE to the design process. On the other hand, Securing and holding the data that had to apply regardless of what changes were made to the model meant that EVERY surface sculpted would conform to every real-world constraint. Highlighting surfaces early meant seeing the flaws AND the implications for fixing them before millions of dollars were spent on pursing a deceptively beautiful design that was conceptually flawed. ……….. The best tool that the best design professionals I ever worked with used was habitual honesty. They made early mistakes. They looked for them early and often. Whether they found them or someone else did, meant nothing to them. They “saw the future” in pursing various courses and ALWAYS got things right in the end. And the end always came much faster and better because they kept their eye on the ultimate team goal all the way. ………… It took fifteen years for my supervisors to see that I could “see the future” in what I was doing by working the same way. Maybe they would have never seen it if I didn’t also do the “impossible” routinely. No, I didn’t really do the impossible. I only recognized when some things that were thought to be impossible because the men (always men) with the best performance reviews couldn’t do them, could actually be done with the available resources. The untapped resources where the things I knew I could do because I’d done them – and the input of dozens of people, like the people here, who could do what I couldn’t. I knew what they could do because I used their special knowledge and abilities frequently. ……….. If the Trojan War had lasted 15 years instead of 10, maybe the Trojans would have believed what Cassandra could do, too. --Jasper