Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

A blink-of-an-eye expert can walk into a situation and point to disastrous mistakes in the blink of an eye.

My wife knows kitchens and what happens in kitchens. She can walk in a kitchen full of people cooking something, and if they are doing something wasteful, she can point to it immediately. She can also instruct the more beneficial way to do it.

I have met other people in my life who have similar expertise in other areas of endeavor. These people have

blink-of-an-eye expertise

I heard this term explained in a class once. I cannot remember who said it. If anyone has heard this before, please comment and tell me who said it to you.

Blink-of-an-eye expertise is something we want on our projects. We don’t need it everyday, but we desperately need it at critical times. We need someone who can spend ten seconds in our project room and say either, “Okay, this is fine,” or “stop right now.”

Since this is a wish-for-something blog post, I shouldn’t stop here. What we really need is an blink-of-an-eye expert who can also pass along the expertise to the rest of us. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could become such experts quickly and painlessly?

Perhaps that how these experts become such experts: painful pasts.