Another Value of Networking (or Just Listening) and the Power of Analogy

I am wrapping up a business trip where I have been tasked to collect information for transferring work from one contracting company to another contracting company. This involves a lot of listening, observing, and being sensitive to people who work for an organization that is losing work. I accomplished what I set out to do, but I also gained a new perspective on something I have worked with for many years.

I have observed and measured help desk and call center phone calls for a long time.  In all of the measurements I have made, including DPMO (Defects Per Million Opportunities), I have looked at what happens per phone call. The person I spoke to today had a different perspective. He described phone calls in terms of book publishing: the longer the book, the more opportunities there are for errors. This provided me the epiphany, or the idea, at least, of measuring errors or events not in terms of errors or events per phone call, but errors or events per phone call minute. I have long known that short phone calls are easier than long ones, but it took talking to this person and hearing his book publishing analogy to consider the idea of measuring events per call minute. This perspective may turn out to be irrelevant in the work I do, but I am still thankful for hearing someone else's new way of looking at something that is familiar to me.

My point isn't that the idea itself is so important (it probably isn't important in your work). What is important to me, and I hope is important to you, is the value I found in listening to someone else. Talking to people outside your own organization is valuable because it gets you outside your own organization's culture of doing things a particular way. Limiting yourself to exchanging ideas only with people in your own organization is like limiting genetic selection in a closed population (think of birth defects occurring among European royalty at the beginning of the 20^th century or of the isolated lion population in the caldera of a dormant volcano in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania). Exchanging ideas only with your coworkers provides the same limitations and possibly limits the quality of your results.

Take opportunities to join professional organizations and civic groups. Find ways to visit organizations who do similar work as you do. Not only do you expand your professional network, but you get to hear new perspectives and new ways of doing things (think of it as cross pollinating your ideas and experiences with those of others). What you hear might be related to something that you have long taken for granted. That is what happened to me today.