A journal entry during my leadership development back in March, 2018. The epiphany that followed was a major driver in career decisions since:

Q:”Do you consider yourself “forward-looking? Provide examples of when you were forward looking or now, looking back, were there missed opportunities? What contributes to your skills at being forward looking, or what skills would you like to develop? What questions does this raise?”

“If you drive fast enough with your eyes locked on the horizon, you have little need for a rear view mirror.”

15 years have passed since that first glimpse of awareness. An idle Wednesday afternoon sitting with my mentor, our project’s lead hardware engineer. We were to discuss his thoughts prior to my performance review with the software engineering group manager. 

My head cants to the side as I ask, “What do you mean? How many times have I truly been wrong?” 

“That is not the point. You should spend more time investigating and gathering information before making a decision.”, he states, obviously bemused by my confusion.

Fast forward to last year, a new location, role, and manager but a similar conversation.

“What do you mean?”, I ask with a sense of deja vu.

“You need to explain your reasoning for decisions if you want to receive the full buy in of your team.”, he explains.

“I provide them with complete transparency, when possible, into the information I have to make my decisions, what more do they need?”, I retort, feeling a twinge of irritation.

What I know now, I wish I knew then – that my decision making process is firmly intuitive and it defines a fundamental part of who I am. I cannot explain how or why I arrive at particular decisions or observations. All I know is that while many of my peers will select the answer they know is correct, I instead commit to the certainty of what I feel is right. When faced with a branch in the path, the choice comes quickly with a resolute decisiveness. I could say I leave no room for doubt, but honestly – there is simply no doubt. But that decisiveness comes with risk. When the decision has failed my conviction has, at times, lead the team over the proverbial waterfall but I see this as simply part of the process – egg vs. omelet. Would effort placed into further investigation ahead of time offset the loss of credibility with my constituents in event of failure?

With concerted effort I can reverse engineer the likely steps that could approximate arriving at the decision, but this is only to placate the directive of my manager regarding buy in. Is it possible to ‘tag’ information that may feed my subconscious decision making with the hope it could help rebuild the steps and reduce the effort required? Or I simply stay the course and rely on my vision, conviction, and drive to alleviate the concerns of my constituents as to the rationality of the path I am taking them on?

I live in my mind, a mind which floats in an ether comprised of possibility, probability, and the Law of Unintended Consequence. In BUSA 3105, the professor posed the query, “A fortune teller states your company will fail in one year, what will you do?”. I merrily declared, “Hypothetical worst case scenario mitigation planning, I love these. Add in a zombie apocalypse and I’d be a fish in water.”. My classmates on the other hand argued the validity of fortune tellers, refused to accept that their employer could fail, or were adamant they could save the organization. I felt like an outsider, the proverbial one eyed man amongst the critically myopic or perhaps a modern day Cassandra. This happens frequently. I guess not everyone has learned how to listen to the whispers of intuition sourced from their subconscious? Is there a process or way I could help nurture this ability in my charges?

Whispers of intuition from a subconscious fed a diet of possibilities. Looking forward into a future I am to bring into existence. 

What are telling me now?

Many consider the emergence of AI to be a threat to the human employee. Being faster, cheaper, and more reliable these sleepless slaves will push many workers into irrelevance. Except in creative endeavours states the common belief. 

I disagree.

I have historically been a driver of change in our company, pushing for increasing procedural asset generation and pipeline automation with the goal of freeing our content creators from repetitive/error prone work as well as enabling increases in the scale of what we can deliver. My latest efforts are starting to delve into machine learning to further increase our content creation bandwidth by removing the dependence on humans as much as possible and my evolving plan is to search out experts in this area to partner with. I think you can gather where I intend to take this.

We/I will ‘solve’ this problem. And yes, automation ultimately will bring disruption. Technological leaps frequently beget social upheaval and social upheaval frequently begets conflict. But on the flip side of that conflict is advancement.  

In the tale of ‘Who Moved My Cheese’, I am neither  ‘Hem’ nor ‘Haw’. Nor am I  ‘Sniff’ or ‘Scurry’. 

I am the one who moves the cheese.

As to the ultimate query to ponder? As we age, those of us who focus on the past and present continually fill a cup of memories. But those of us who are always looking to the possibilities of tomorrow have an ever draining cup of opportunities. How am I going to address this, what impact will it have on me knowing that the cup will eventually empty?