Lesson: Even if you have a Dremel rotary tool hanging in the garage, sometimes that old putty knife in the drawer can still come in handy.
Today I took my department offsite to grok out a complicated analytical task. It had a lot of moving parts. After examining all the analytical and sharing tools at our disposal, SPSS, SQL, Meetingplace, Sharepoint, Wikis, KJ technique….I confidently selected the right tools for the tasks. The winner: MS Excel and a screen projector. With the addition of some comfy chairs and quality snacks, it got the job done.

Lesson: Know the difference between minutiae and details. You can probably get away with ignoring minutiae – not so much on the details.
The facility at which we held the session failed again and again to sieze opportunities to help us work efficiently. They sent us up to a room they said was open and wasn’t. Fifteen minutes lost there. The whiteboard and phone were there as promised, and the comfy chairs too. Good. Uh oh, electrical outlets 12 feet from the table, no power cords anywhere. Twenty minutes lost there improvising a new set-up. Tasty lunch, all the orders gotten right, on their seventy-five minute pacing instead of our forty-five. How many times have I seen my beloved Red Sox hit the ball well enough, but rack up enough errors to lose the game? It felt a little like that today.

Lesson: The most unlikely things can make the difference between victory and defeat. Despite the challenges, we got it done. Why? We’re professionals. We’re motivated. We genuinely like each other. We kept the process simple enough so we wouldn’t get lost in the weeds. And we had snacks. One place this facility overdelivered on was the cookies. Okay, they overdelivered them twenty minutes after we finished lunch, but they were better than… a lot of things in life. They injected the sugar rush that got us to the finish line. Who knew? Well, I did. Cookies and Excel. Sometimes it just works.