25d • General discussion
Practice Library, Lesson 2.2
A worked example from my own practice
Before any of you post, I want to do the practice myself. So you can see what I am asking of you, and so you have something to follow rather than a blank page to fill.
This is my own answer to the brief above. It is a drive home I keep coming back to.
The road was the A66 heading east across Cumbria. It would have been ten or twelve years ago now. The time was around five in the afternoon on a Friday in November. The light was beginning to go. I had been on site all week. The job was a planned shutdown on a heavy industrial plant in the north of England. The week had gone well by every measurable standard. The audits had been clean. The work had been completed ahead of schedule. There had been no incidents. The team had been pleased.
And on the drive home, alone in the car, the voice arrived.
It said something like this, and I am paraphrasing because the exact words have softened in my memory, but the substance of it is unmistakable. It said, the workforce performed safety for you this week. They did not own it. The moment you left the site this afternoon, the version of the culture you have been working on for six months walked out with you. And you do not have a single piece of evidence to the contrary.
That was the voice. Not a flash of insight. Not a dramatic moment. A quiet, calm, devastating piece of self-knowledge that arrived because, for an hour and a half, I was alone with my thoughts and my professional defences had been left at the site gate.
I did not do anything with it. I pushed it down. I told myself the voice was Friday tiredness. I had a glass of wine that evening and the voice was gone by the next morning. On Monday I went back onto site and ran the same kind of week I had been running for the previous six months. Three more shutdowns came and went, on different sites, with the same dynamic. The dashboard stayed green. The Friday voice came back periodically, and I pushed it down periodically.
Here is what I would do now.
The recognition. When the voice arrived in the car, I would notice it. Not push it down, not explain it away as tiredness, not finish the journey and reach for the wine. I would say to myself, plainly, this is information. The voice is responding to something my professional defences spent the week filtering out. What is it.
The pulling over. I would, on the next quiet stretch of road, pull into a layby for five minutes. Five minutes is enough. I would write down, on the back of a receipt or in my phone, two sentences. The first sentence, what the voice said. The second sentence, the most specific moment from the week that the voice is responding to. Not the abstract concern. The specific person, the specific exchange, the specific glance away that my conscious mind walked past on Wednesday and the voice has now surfaced on Friday.
The Saturday morning practice. Thirty minutes on a Saturday morning with a notebook. Not a polished review. A page of honest writing about what I am actually noticing on the site I am responsible for. What has improved this week. What has slipped. What I am watching that I cannot yet name. The page does not need to be coherent. It needs to be honest.
The Monday morning consequence. Whatever the voice surfaced, whatever the Saturday page named, there is one action that goes to the top of Monday's list. Not the whole reform programme. One action. One conversation with the worker the voice was responding to. One quiet check on the supervisor who has been carrying something. One look at the part of the job nobody has talked about in two weeks.
By the third or fourth weekend of running this practice, it stops feeling like extra work. It becomes the practice that turns the Friday afternoon voice from a weight I carry into information I use. The leaders who have learned to listen to the voice in the car on Friday afternoon are the leaders who have learned to act on it on Monday morning.
I think about that A66 drive more than I think about most of the technical decisions I made that year. Not because anything went wrong on that shutdown. Nothing did. I think about it because of what I did not listen to, and because of the six months that followed in which I kept not listening to the same voice on different Fridays.
That is the work this module is asking you to do. Find your own drive home. Write the conversation you had with yourself in the car. Post it below.
I will read what you write.
Paul.
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Practice Library, Lesson 2.2
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