Listen

Before the methodology, before the framework, before the roadmap - I listen. Not to confirm what I already think I know, but to learn what I didn't know.

I have seen this in project work, physics experiments, classrooms, wilderness coaching and painting: The real problem is almost always hiding behind the solution you arrived with.

My job, before anything else, is to go in as a blank slate, let the actual picture speak - and listen. Listen and learn.

Align

Alignment is undervalued. In physics, when all forces pull in different directions, nothing moves - or the strongest one drags all else against their will. Neither makes for a good project. Alignment is the work of getting the forces to point roughly the same way.

Half of alignment is listening: once people have been heard, they will hear each other. The rest is translating between domain languages and uniting stakeholders behind a mutual cause.

A decade of teaching Sciences turns out to prepare you surprisingly well for that. You have to translate the same difficult idea for a 7th-grader, a 14 year old know-it-all, the kid who could not care less, and the senior who plans to become the next Marie Curie. Now align all of those with their parents, school leadership, and the ministry of education. After aligning that room, any other is manageable.

Resolve

Once you know the boundary conditions (you listened) and what you are solving for (you aligned), the problem is specified. That is where the work of resolving starts - not before. Skip ahead, and you run in circles, or straight into dead ends [1].

Trust the process. The equation does not write itself, but once it is on the page, the path to the answer is mostly disciplined recipe-following. Well-defined frameworks help; doctrine does not. The art is choosing the path that fits the conditions in front of you, not the one that worked last time.

I love this work - methodically, theoretically, technically, organisationally. Apparently different problems, but really the same on a more abstract level. After enough cycles, you start to see the loops and dead ends before they happen. Anticipation is the quiet secret to a smooth cycle.

[1] Students hate running in circles or into dead ends, and yet they get ahead of themselves constantly. Teams of grown-ups aren't much better.

Shape

Arguably the most important part of creating something is to actually shape it into reality - to leave a mark when the smoke has faded. But you do not decide to cross Siberia with a pair of shoes and a knife from one day to another.

First you go glamping. That is your MVP. Then camping, then trekking, then a sleep under the trees. Each iteration drops a luxury and adds a capability. Somewhere along the way, you might even realise you didn't need to cross Siberia at all. Either way - you actually started doing things, not just planning a far-fetched project.

I led the digitalisation of a school built in the 1950s - not as one grand rollout, but in years of iteration adapted to whatever the conditions allowed. At one point that meant running a network cable through a window so the rest of the building could keep working. When I started, we had chalkboards, PCs from 2004 and daily system failures. When I left, every classroom had a modern workstation and interactive whiteboard, the network was remotely managed - and attendance, scheduling and other work that previously ran on paper now essentially runs itself. I delivered. I left my mark.

Now I would like to leave it somewhere else.