Heard a story ....

The professional conference that I mentioned recently ended today, and I headed home. The conference itself was interesting, and I learned a lot. Part of what I learned is how very much more there is to know about this field than I ever knew. So in a way it's a shame that I'm near the end of my career and not right at the beginning. Maybe I could have done a better job all those years if only I'd known what I was doing.

But during the conference I heard a funny story ... or maybe just an odd one. We'd just finished listening to a talk where the speaker encouraged creative problem-solving: the kind of advice where, if your team of engineers is stuck on a problem, he tells you to add an artist or a theologian to the team [those were his examples] because he or she will "think differently" and therefore "break the logjam." And one woman asked a question that amounted to, "How do we persuade management to accept this idea?" But in the process of asking her question, she told a story.

Some time ago, she was working for NASA. One particular launch had just been scrubbed because of some equipment failure, and she was on the team that was supposed to analyze the failed equipment to find out what went wrong. The failed equipment was being sent back for them to study, but it had not arrived yet. But it so happened that at the same time, she was starting to learn to read Tarot cards. She did a reading for the problem, and identified exactly what was wrong ... before the parts ever arrived. Analyzing the parts after they arrived simply confirmed the diagnosis that the Tarot cards had already made. And her fellow team-members enjoined her, in the strongest possible terms, "Never tell anyone. Never speak of this again."

Funny. Or I thought it was.