We deal with obligations all the time, and probably don’t think too much about it.

Today, a test result is yet to be returned to us – it’s still pending, 6 days after the test was done.

We’re obligated to stay in isolation, even though the tested person has recovered and no longer has symptoms. However, our obligation is that we wait for an official negative result. Meanwhile the curtains come down all over the world, and we’re as far away from home as we can be.

Obligations rely on humans doing the right thing. The right thing sometimes tests us.

We’re living through history at the moment. In the future, there will be ongoing reference to the year of 2020, and everyone will know what it refers to. Same as terms like 9/11, WWI or Princess Di, there will be a moniker for 2020, be it covid or something else. We will immediately know what it means.

I had a terrific week slip-sliding down glistening snow on the left side of the land of the maple leaf, as I reached for the half-century. The second week, though, has been spent in the land of uncertainty. Many 100-word thoughts to come.

Some of us around here will be taking a break from #100wordsaday, for about two weeks, because, some of us around here are having a big "0" birthday very shortly.

So, some of us have decided to celebrate it; and some of us will be celebrating it by intentionally slipping down a slope; slipping down that snowy slope as fast and/or as gracefully as we can.

Ok, it's me.

This will occur in the land of the maple leaf, and it will occur on the better side: the left side.

See you on the other side of the half-century.

In the business environment, we’re either consuming or producing. In fact, in our lives in general, we are either consuming or producing, every day, all the time.

The food we consume was produced by someone else. Watching TV or Netflix is consuming the creative production of someone else. That also consumes electricity, which was produced elsewhere. An engineering design we produce is consumed by the manufacturer, who then produces something for the user to consume.

Also important is that the producer (usually) makes money to produce the thing, and the consumer (usually) spends it in order to have the thing.

In the modern office workplace, many required skills are just taken for granted.

Workers in the knowledge economy are expected to know how to, say, prepare for meetings and take relevant notes, though I don’t recall being specifically taught that. Similarly, we’re expected to operate MS Word, Excel or even PowerPoint to the extent that they are useful tools, though formal training is rarely arranged.

More importantly are skills in the accumulation, storage and retrieval of relevant information, be it in an email, or worse, in an online article which is gone when you go to look for it again.

On entering a networking event, choose to join a loose group of two or three, especially if one of the three is looking around and isn’t fully engaged.

Don’t push into a tight-knit group who are animatedly talking and leaning into each other, unless you know one of them well; this is a tough crowd to start with.

Also be aware that the person standing solo might be standing solo for a reason – but that doesn’t mean don’t talk to them. If you’re new and don’t know many people, even the boring person might be better than standing alone yourself.

There’s a fundamental part of gaining knowledge that is easy to overlook: the role of curiosity.

Knowledge is defined in the dictionary as some form of these definitions: a) an awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation or b) facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education.

They seem similar. But a closer look differentiates them between “familiarity” and “acquired”.

You can have a familiarity about a wide range of things – just check your Facebook feed for that.

But consciously acquiring knowledge? That requires a certain amount of curiosity in the mix.

Knowledge is gained through experience, or reading, or being trained, or sometimes just instinct. When there is a conscious need to learn something, there’s a way to do that: read a book, find a training course, or just jump in and try.

With online tutorials, or Wikipedia, or of course the ubiquitous Google search, information is at your fingertips. The quality of the information, of course, is a different topic.

However – it’s true that knowledge is more easily absorbed if it is in short amounts, and often.

This seems to be much better than reviewing large amounts of information, infrequently.

Recently I became aware of a list of “overlooked eight” items that quality auditors note are often missing during infrastructure development projects:

1. Defined objectives and KPIs

2. Interface management between stakeholders

3. Risk management (people, environment; business risk and integrity risk)

4. Project handover plans

5. Safe operating limits: at what defined point are things ‘really bad’.

6. Emergency response

7. Recovery and repair plan

8. Ongoing status and insight into the effectiveness of own plans and procedures.

So, if you have a handle on these aspects in your business or your project, then you’re ahead of many others.

Knowledge can be described as either procedural skills or declarative knowledge. A procedural skill is claimed by stating “I know how to…”, and declarative knowledge is claimed by stating “I know that… ”. Procedural skills and declarative knowledge are visible, measurable, and tacit.

If I say, “I know how to … ride a bike”, there’s a way to demonstrate that knowledge. If I say, “I know that … the Pythagorean Theorem will help solve this problem”, that knowledge can be demonstrated.

One way to demonstrate what we know, is to categorise by “I know how to…” or “I know that…”.

Tangible assets are physical assets with known monetary value (for the most part). Company balance sheets also have a line item for ‘intangible assets’ – things like goodwill or reputation, data, or intellectual property, which have lately become a larger part of a company’s balance sheet. Yet it is so difficult to assign value to intangible things.

The future is more and more about intangibles – services, knowledge, data, reputation, clouds, and baristas.

The knowledge one interests me the most – helping people to define competence, improving knowledge transfer, and, describing experiences so that it has value. That’s intangible assets in a nutshell.

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, did it make a sound?

Similarly (not really, but stay with me here), if you have an experience but don’t tell anyone about it, did it happen?

Throughout our careers, we are learning and realising and changing and growing … and we hardly even notice it. But when job hunting or looking for that promotion, experience is taken as proof of reality.

Describing your experience – telling the story of “what happened” – is essential. Yet we don’t really learn how to do that; not well, anyway.

Friction is resistance; a force preventing motion. It’s there when it’s just harder to get something moving. There’s lots of science and math around it; there’s even a coefficient of friction for use in equations.

We can also “feel” friction. It’s there in social media, or when trying to get a loan from the bank, and it can be in our personal relationships. I’m not sure there’s a coefficient for that.

Friction, though, is like conflict: there’s the bad type, and also there’s the good.

Good friction in risk management means it will be harder for bad things to happen.

I use time blocks, instead of a to-do or task list. Calendar blocks inform what to dedicate my time to each day. The calendar includes blocks for commuting, meals, and exercise. There’s a block for “Email/Admin”, and, emails with a substantial task associated get copied into a dedicated 30min appointment.

What I’m not good at – but learning to – is allocating enough time for ‘switching’ between tasks. This is the mental ‘shift’ from, say, reading a report, to, say, phoning someone about a scope of work. These are different tasks requiring a different cognitive focus. And that takes time. Switching time.

Expertise is based on pattern recognition. It develops over time by having seen it all before. But experts are susceptible to implicit assumptions, unintentionally preventing deeper or original thought.

Reviewing projects or checking designs is so important. Reviewers shouldn’t have the exact or even similar experience or background as the originator – they may have the same ‘connections’ (implicit assumptions) and won’t see an error.

It’s difficult to overcome implicit assumptions – mostly because we don’t know we’re making them. This is especially true if we’ve become very good at something: we forget to think differently or think beyond what we know.

An uncomfortable truth of diversity (of gender, background, skills, thought) is that diverse means different. And different, sorry to say, is not naturally easy for humans.

Humans default to making life as easy as possible. We use biases, heuristics and shortcuts to lighten the cognitive load on our already maxed out brains.

Be cognisant of the resulting difficulties of diversity. This does not mean ‘don’t do it’, it means: provide support to those who are the recipients of diversity.

Know that there are members of the culturally similar team who may not be ready for the difficulties responding to difference.

As the saying goes, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

So you need to know something, but knowing things is not enough. You also need to be known, too: be known for something.

“Hashtag” yourself. Have a definitive description of what you do, or who you are, or what interests you most.

When someone asks about you, don’t first launch into a long drawn out story. Instead, start with the hashtag, and if there is a point of connection, the conversation will carry on from there. If there isn’t a connection with that, ask them something instead.

“If you’re not sure, just ask” is an all-too-common conclusion to training days and induction materials. It’s an easy throw-away line that should be more considered. The other, similar one is concluding with, “Ask your supervisor”.

Firstly, the supervisor sometimes doesn’t know either, and that makes it awkward for everyone. Secondly, it puts the onus on the asker to come up with a clear question. If they aren’t sure, they might not even know what question to ask.

Thirdly, and most importantly, is a person shouldn’t need to be told it’s an option to ask, it should be a given.

One of the hardest parts of networking is learning people’s names. Always say your name clearly. Don’t assume that people hear your name or can read your nametag. Even if you’ve met the person before, and especially if they are a new acquaintance, do the courtesy of saying your name again. This is enormously helpful for that acquaintance if they’ve forgotten your name. And, of course, listen to their name and try try try to remember it – do word associations, repeat it back, whatever tricks you can find for remembering names. For some, this is the hardest part of networking.

Waiting for the other person to finish talking, is not listening. I don’t know where I first heard that, but I like it.

Get into the habit of asking others about what interests them. And then listen to the answers. Notice what is lighting them up, and file it away for the future, especially if it’s something you have in common. Then remember to ask the next time you meet: how did their daughter’s recital go, or if their project problem got solved to their satisfaction.

Networking is about connecting with people, and connecting means finding a point of connection.