Gap Fillers

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 53 DAYS

Al Menzies joined Maura and I today on what is now officially the General Assistance and Processing (GAP) team. It’s far from what I expected when Maura advertised it as “special operations”: we will essentially be assisting other local teams with tasks that they can’t work on because of higher priorities.

Ambassador Lazlo announced it today at the Boulder field office, whose official name (Rocky Mountain Operations Center) she insisted we start using. As soon as she left we were presented by personnel there with a ten-page list of items in need of attention throughout the region. The first page was filled with a list of measurement instruments at TC-013 that needed onsite calibration, so we decided to go there first.

The residents of the test community left for a training event, leaving us alone with a set of e-book manuals, a paper map, and Al’s expert assistance to perform the calibrations. Lazlo had given us full latitude to suggest improvements and list any issues we might find with any task we were assigned, and for me the first one was obvious: simplify both the instruments and the procedures so that a layman could do the job without electronic help. Second on my list of improvements was map standardization, because even someone like me with basic navigational skills was having a lot of trouble using this particular map to find the instruments.

We were done with the calibrations by mid-day, but had to wait for at least one member of the test community to return before we could leave. Al wanted to explore the rest of the area, so Maura gave him the tour while I typed up our report at the guest cabin (the one place I hadn’t been before) using a manual typewriter that was at least forty years old and had an inked ribbon that was probably bought online. I wondered if even that technology will be viable thirty years from now if the strategy is successful.

Reality Check

Will is beginning to ask some of the hard questions, as was intended by forming his new team. In my experience, you learn the most by trying to DO something rather than predicting it.