The way I think

I have nearly skipped the visit more than once.

There is always plenty to do, and a trip to see how a product is actually being maintained can easily wait. The pattern is familiar: an expensive component is being replaced far too often, and it looks like a reliability problem.

When I have gone to see the work for myself, the explanation has often changed. In one case the maintenance company was measured on turnaround time. Replacing the component was quick, and there was no penalty for replacing one that still worked. We had been treating the number of replacements as the number of failures.

I have seen versions of that story in several companies, with different parts and different contracts. The fix has usually involved a way to test the parts and a change to how replacements are ordered. But what interests me now, looking back, is the movement in my own thinking: from the part, to the people handling it, to the arrangements that made their decisions sensible.

I recognise that movement in so much of my work. For years I was using it without thinking very much about what it said about me.

I began my engineering career writing real-time software in assembler for avionics. Since then I have built systems, led businesses, made decisions I am proud of and made others I would very much like to have back. Looking across those years, I can see the woman doing the work more clearly than I could when I was busy being her.

I can see the curiosity and the absorption. I can also see the impatience, and how easily being committed to something could become being consumed by it.

A complex system can occupy a great deal of space in my head. The connections, the dependencies, the awkward case that looks small but changes everything: they become part of how I understand the whole. Explaining that understanding is another task altogether. What feels connected in my mind has to be unfolded for someone else, piece by piece.

That gap has mattered throughout my career. It has made me interested in how much of a person's thinking becomes visible to the people around them, and how much can remain unseen.

It is one reason I care about giving people time to think before asking them to speak. A thought may need a little room before it is ready to be examined. Someone else may need to write it down. The person who speaks first has not necessarily seen furthest.

Idea Mining and Conscious Collaboration grew partly from those concerns, and partly from watching capable people struggle in arrangements that made contributing unnecessarily difficult. I wanted useful ideas to have a better chance of being heard and developed.

I did not understand all of that at the beginning. I tried things, returned to them, changed them and gradually found better words for what I was seeing. Sometimes an idea had been part of my working life for years before I understood how it connected to another one. And some of that learning was uncomfortable.

Earlier in my leadership career, experienced colleagues challenged a direction I wanted to take. I overruled them too quickly. I wanted to establish pace and show that I could lead. When the problems they had anticipated appeared, I had to go back and acknowledge that I had not listened. I have written about that before.

I remember finding it harder than it ought to have been. Admitting the mistake meant giving up the comfortable feeling that my original confidence had been justified. I have needed the pauses and the checks I write about, and I still do.

The lesson stayed with me. Some directors lead by position: you do it because I said so. Years later I told a senior leadership team who reported to me, “If I ever tell you to do something because of my position, shoot me, because I’ve failed.” A job title can end an argument. It cannot settle one. If I cannot explain why a direction is right, I should not expect anyone to commit to it, and if someone in the room has seen further than I have, I want to find out before we start, not after.

There were costs outside work too. When my children were young, I could be physically at home while my attention remained with the business. I told myself the effort was for them. It took me longer to recognise that what they needed from me included the attention I was giving elsewhere.

Deep absorption can be valuable. Living well with it takes more understanding than simply being pleased with how much work you can do.

More recently, building with AI has brought an unexpected pleasure. I can carry an architectural idea into something working while its shape is still present in my mind. I can try it, see what happens and change it without first having to divide the whole thought into work for other people.

I have written about the engineering implications elsewhere. The personal part is how much imagination that continuity has released. After decades in this work, I am still discovering what I might be able to make. I am also still discovering where I am wrong. The tools make it easier to build what I intended; someone still has to question whether my intention was sound.

In practice, this is what I bring when a company asks for help, and it starts where this piece did: going to see the work for myself, even when it could wait. I look for the arrangement behind a puzzling result before blaming the people in it. I make room for the quieter thinking in a team, because the answer is often already there. And I question intentions, mine included, before anyone builds on them.

Looking back, I would be wary of giving my younger self a neat explanation of who she was. I am still revising that explanation myself. But I would like her to understand sooner that the way she thinks deserves attention and care, including the parts that make some situations harder.

If you recognise something of yourself here, I hope that is useful. You may need time to understand what you bring, help with the things you find difficult, and people whose thinking can challenge and extend your own.

I have needed all three. Much of the work I am proudest of has come from learning how to make room for them.