Drawers

I had an opportunity not too long ago to visit the hospital, and while I was there, I was noticing the drawers, cabinets, and equipment they had around the room. Of course everything was on wheels and there were all sorts of different machines, signs and bins for disposal of all the various stuff.

What truly stuck out to me were two rolling carts with drawers.

One of them was this large rolling cart with multi colored drawers. Each drawer in addition to being a color was also labeled: Pink/Red, Purple, Yellow, White, Blue, Orange, and Green. On the opposite side of each drawer, was a piece of masking tape with another label scribbled onto it in the usual doctor’s handwriting. Each drawer had at least one and most of them then had the first label crossed out with a sharpie and a new label written on it. Equally illegible.

The other cart was all the same color, a drab sterile grey-ish color. The cart had large labels on it. Each label was a folded piece of paper shoved into a clear sleeve that was glued to the front of the drawer. The label printed in a plain font in all caps. It was far from a genius design, but it made the necessary point. No room for ambiguity.

As you live your life, which are you?

In a hospital room, I want to know my nurse, doctor, surgeon, or EMT is reaching for the drawer labeled MEDS when she is looking for the necessary meds to keep me alive. I do not want her opening the Orange drawer and then opening the White drawer and then opening the Red/Pink drawer to find what she needs.

If my son is putting his toys away, I want the multicolored rolling drawers. I can work with him to learn his colors and help him access/store his toys. He needs more opportunities to work with colors, not fewer.

When someone talks to you, are they talking to the grey drab well labeled drawers, when they need the multicolored drawers, poorly labeled, but full of personality? Or does your job need the consistent and stable grey drawers, well labeled and ready for action and you are trying to be the brightly colored poorly labeled drawers and making everyone’s day more difficult?

How do you need to change to better suit your work environment? How does your product need to change to better suit its use case?

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There and Back Again

Last summer, I had the opportunity to transition from Real Life to Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL) at the Event Center. All in all, a pretty seamless transition. Of course I was sad to leave the Real Life family whom I had become so close to over the 8 years I had been a volunteer or staff member. All in all, it was the right move to make. I genuinely believe I was taken there for a reason and I am glad to have had the opportunity to be there.

While I was there I was able to make new friends and acquaintances with so many people within SEL and the Moscow-Pullman communities as a whole. I am so glad to have these new relationships. I am glad to have been a part of an organization wholly dedicated to producing quality products for their customers and continuing to be a staple of the community not only only on the Palouse and the Lewis-Clark Valley but all over the world. SEL is truly dedicated to making power safer, more reliable, and more economical.

After forty weeks, three weeks, and three days I have returned to Real Life to join the staff again as a part of the Creative Arts Team. I have been developing the way we plan and prepare for Sunday Mornings, our larger events, and finding and sharing the stories of God working in people’s lives within Real Life.

My time at SEL was not the best of times for a variety of reasons. I cannot speak to the parts of it that were not my responsibility but I can speak to the parts for which I know I am responsible. And there is no doubt I had a role to play in my time at SEL.

The biggest personal change I experienced is being knocked down a few notches. Going into SEL, I was very full of myself. I had grown and developed far beyond where I had started.

And

I

Knew

It

I left Real Life with an axe to grind, a chip on my shoulder, and my nose turned up at the world. My experience at SEL reminded me of who I am. I am a member of the cast of life, not the star of the show.

I learned several lessons in my time at SEL. I hope to lose none of them. But this one lesson I hope will never leave me personally. I do not know that I could ever teach someone the experience I received in developing my humility. My humility will now and forever be the best tool I have in learning from others, loving those who matter, and leading those who I am so fortunate to lead.

Humbly,

–JT

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Roles

Being in a new role now, I have much to learn. A new team, new responsibilities, and new processes galore. I have so much to learn and it is everything I can do not to go crazy learning it all. It is not so much the process of learning or the learning that is killing me. It is the feeling of being so new. The feeling of being semi inept at everything and relying on everyone around me to bail me out at every turn because of my inexperience. I will get over it. However, I long to never forget what it is like and how it feels to be working through a new role. How there are volumes of information to learn and my only tool for learning them is time.

In the most different of ways, my patience is being tested. My patience with myself is being tested. I usually have no problem being patient with other people. But, now I have to be patient with myself. I have to wait for everything to become engrained in my mind so that I do not forget it. And, in the event I choose not to be patient, I am handicapping myself and making the learning almost impossible because I will be trying to shortcut the process, skip steps, and potentially break something.

Ultimately, I have to be patient or I will not last in what I am doing.
What are you learning? How patient are you being with yourself as you learn it? How patient are you with others who are learning around you?

Patiently,

–JT

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Performance Review

Having gone through the hiring process recently, I had an odd revelation. “If I was my own boss, would I hire me to be me.” It was a question of self reflection. Would I actually hire me to be me or would I pass me over? When it comes to growth/improvement, quality, and consistency, would I hire me to do be me, or would I keep looking for someone else to do the job? It was an odd question, but it really made me step back and take a look at how good of a job I have been doing what I might expect from someone in my stage of life.

Then I rearranged my into a new question, If I were my boss and I was up for a review, what would my review look like? Would it be a good review? Would I be pleased with how I am doing? Would I be succeeding in my role? What would my growth plan look like?

How about you, would you hire you to be you? If you were your boss and you had to create a growth plan for yourself, what would the growth plan look like? What would the deadlines and measurable be? Where are you succeeding? What are the areas you have that might fall into the category of ‘needs improvement’?

Reviewing,

–JT

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Job To Be Done

One of the podcasts I listen to is hosted by Horace Dediu. He is an analyst and all around a really interesting person full of great discussions and observations revolving around “[Apple and the]…success and failure in the evolving story of mobile computing and related industries….” A frequent theme of the show is the discussion of what the job-to-be-done is of a specific item, tool, company, or corporation. The jobs-to-be-done comes from the Clay Christensen Institute and they have a great definition for what it means to discuss the “jobs-to-be-done framework.”

My favorite part about the jobs-to-be-done definition is in reference to how you hire a product when you purchase it. The transactional nature of hiring paints, in me, a beautiful picture. I can see myself walking into a grocery store looking to hire some eggs and take them home with me or looking to hire some new headphones because my old ones broke. As I look for new headphones, I go to my favorite review site and see who they suggest to hire. I read the user reviews on Amazon, the reviews and comparisons on my favorite site, and of course price compare across a few different e-retailers as well as a brick-and-mortar or two, if I can. When I make the ultimate decision on my headphones, I hire them. (This process is so different from a 21st century employer going to LinkedIn and vetting their applicants or googling their applicants.) 

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I on the other have a job to be done as well. Not the job to be done because I am hired to do it, but the job to be done as I am intrinsically inspired to do. I must do the job I am inspired to do and do it well. I have a job to do because of the talents I have, skills I have, and the way I am designed. I am fortunate to have been hired to do this job not only in life but also for a career. I am so thankful my job-to-be-done is what I get to do every day. 

I have found the intersection of what I like to do and what the world needs from someone like me. The jobs-to-be-done framework inspires me to look at the world as a marketplace. The interactions between people, businesses, cars, technology, and nature. Looking at all of these parts I have watched them and observationally studied them. I have watched for the things that did not make sense. The things that did not quite fit together. The parts and pieces that did not quite belong and I began pushing at these pieces. Poking them. Questioning them. Analyzing how they work and trying to relate to them. The more I watched, analyzed, and related the more I began to see what in me has sprang up and became more excited about my observations. My observations began to show me who I am. My ability to relate to my observations cued me into what I breathes life into me. I noticed the things that mattered to me and helped me see how I fit into the world. 

What is your job-to-be-done? What parts of the world around you strike you as odd? How do you relate to these parts of the world?

Observing the odd,

–JT

Features

Have you ever experienced a broken product? It just does not do the job you paid for it to do. You try, you finagle. You adjust. It does not do the job you have put money out to have done. No matter what you do or how you rearrange it, it does not work. It actually even brings the other products around it down too. They are not as functional as they could be because of this one product. It is not as if this product is not doing anything. The product is simply functioning in a useless way. It will not do what you need it to do and it will keep doing things you do not need it to do. And what’s worse, sometimes it even does things counterproductive to the environment it is in.

I feel like the broken product sometimes. Other times I look back at life and see points in my life where I was a broken product. I am never proud of those moments. Broken product moments are when I am not being an enhancement to the people around me. I am trying to do the right thing. I am trying to help. However, I am limited by my perspective or my understanding of the situation. Other times I am limited by my maturity, selfishness, or personal grievances. I am not idle am doing something. The question is, am I doing something productive or counterproductive. Am I operating as a feature or as a hindrance? Another way to ask this questions is, Am I doing the job I have been hired to do? I do not only mean in the professional sense but also the personal sense. For instance, my wife has hired me to be her husband, my friends have hired me to be a good friend, my landlord has hired me to rent their apartment. Hiring someone does not mean they are being paid for the job to be done. Hiring someone means they are given the tools and believed to be capable of the job to be done. (I will have to discuss my thoughts and the thoughts I have gleaned from others on this topic later.) When I do the job I have been hired for, I enhance my environment; but, when I do not do the job I have been hired for, I impede my environment from achieving it’s full potential.

I strive to be a feature to the people around me, to my friends, spouse, coworkers, and family. I try to be a feature. However, how can a feature know if it is a hindrance? 

They are both trying to do what they are designed to do. They are both operational. They both are trying to move their agenda forward. However, how does their environment react? Is their environment a better place because they are operating in the way they are designed? Are the people around me better for knowing me?

Are you a feature or a hindrance? Are the people around you better for knowing you? Are you doing the job you’ve been hired to do?

Featuring,

–JT