Life Lessons: What Did You Learn?

Do you remember the first time you learned a real “Life Lesson”?

Maybe it was with a brother or sister. Maybe it is a best friend. Maybe it is a co-worker. Maybe it is a Mother or a Father. Maybe it is a Grand Parent? Maybe it is a doctor. Maybe it is a lawyer.

Your particular “Life Lessons” will most likely be a combination of events and of coaches along the journey.

How about the time you were picking up your sibling from a friends house at 9:00PM on a Sunday night? The “Blue” flashing lights from the police in the rear view mirror was unexpected, yet driving 42 MPH in a 25 MPH zone at 17 years old, resulted in a traffic ticket and drivers license 30 day suspension.

How about the time you were assigned a vital project at work with a date/time certain deadline and it was 3 hours late? Your supervisor/boss/commander asked you to come to their office and they shut the door. The tone of their voice was stern and it was a little bit loud, as they explained how your failure to submit your part of the project, delayed the customers shipment and they canceled the order.

Your particular “Life Lessons” will typically occur when your lack of experience or your apathetic mental attitude, puts you in a direct intersection with some new learning opportunity.

The question is, What did you Learn?

Follow the rules when driving an automotive vehicle. Turn in your work assignments early or on-time. Tell the truth. Save money. Pay your bills. Any of the Ten Commandments. Use an 18-multi-character password.

One life lesson you will certainly learn, is that making mistakes is inevitable. Understood. Making the same mistake over and over, is an unwillingness to comply with the defined rules or a real learning deficiency.

Which is it?

Life's analogies are prolific. Three strikes and you are out. Or where there is smoke there is fire.

Should you find yourself in a bad place or a difficult situation, where you are asking yourself “Again,” why am I here again, then perhaps you need to ask for some real help.

Whether your own journey is successful or is not successful is entirely up to you. It is now totally up to you as a person, citizen, student, colleague, or an employee whether you are truly capable of learning real lessons in life.

Now that you too have found the help and the coaching you need, Onward!

Live a wonderful life and always remember your own “Life Lessons”…

Reliable: Who Do You Have Faith In?

When you think of the person you would recommend for a particular task or to perform defined professional services, who comes to mind?

There are many ways and words to describe a person or the business, yet if you had only one word to choose from, what would it be?

Reliable  adjective

1: suitable or fit to be relied on: DEPENDABLE

2: giving the same result on successive trials

Reliable noun

1: one that is reliable

In many cases, this is the word people really mean to use, as the basis for their recommendation.

Whether a business or a person is reliable, makes all the difference in your world, especially if you must rely on the outcomes of their service or duty.

When someone or something you pay for, does not meet a series of positive results, you begin to question your decision to utilize the service or receive the product for use.

Unfortunately for many people and businesses, this word “Reliable” is not considered or even measured on a consistent or measurable basis.

"Over the course of time in your life, think of one person or business you could say was truly reliable."

Think of this one person or business you have utilized for more than ten years that is reliable.

In any professional capacity, becoming reliable takes many years of practice and substantial learning. It requires the development of people, processes, systems and real innovation.

Now, think about someone or an entity (business, product, government agency) that you have lost faith in.

The people or businesses that you have stopped interaction with, have become “Unreliable” for your particular requirements or expectations of quality of service.

How would our world change for the better if there was more learning and focus on being “Reliable”?

How can you as a person or business become top of mind, when someone is asked “Who would you recommend” to: _________________?

You too, can become truly reliable…

Navigator: Trusted Journey...

Looking out over the horizon, what visual geographic point will you navigate towards in order to achieve your mission objective?

Navigator noun

Nav-i-ga-tor

:one that navigates or is qualified to navigate

We looked at the map and wondered what obstacles we would encounter across the challenging journey ahead of us.

We were planning as a team of two, to travel to a place together that we had never been before.

As we looked across the table from each other, with our data and imagery on the laptop screen before us, we laughed.

Your mission together will also be epic. It may require hours and days or weeks of effective planning, yet the most vital tool, will be how you are communicating to your partner.

You both clearly know the objective and the destination. You know the deadline.

Now, how will you “Navigate” to reach that place, you have both dreamed about together?

Weeks later, this particular journey was over and we knew ahead of our launch, that the navigation and the communication was going to be unpredictable.

Perhaps most important. What did we learn together?

Whether it was navigate left or right, navigate up or down, navigate to these precise coordinates at this altitude or depth, there was one thing we truly learned.

You have to trust your navigator 100%.

Yes of course there will be continuous questions and answers along the journey. Timely and effective communication is vital.

The only way to build that “Trust Factor” to 100% is more time together in practice.

Discovering what failure looks, feels and sounds like.

Learning together, means that you are well on your way, to future achievements you could never have dreamed about.

Who is your single trusted “Navigator”...

C²: Enterprise Continuous Continuity…

Business Crisis and Continuity Management (BCCM) is a dynamic change management initiative that requires dedicated resources, funding and auditing.

Since effective BCCM analysis is a 24/7 operation, it takes a combination of factors across the organization to provide what one might call C², or “Continuous Continuity”.

A one-time threat or risk assessment or even an annual look at what has changed across the enterprise is opening the door for a Board of Directors worst nightmare. These nightmares are “Loss Events” that could have been prevented or mitigated all together.

According to the best practices from several sources, the Board of Directors is responsible for the BCCM of an organization. Let’s take a look at what the highly influential Basel Committee says about one principle as it pertains to business continuity:

Review and Testing of Business Continuity Plans – Basel Principle 13

“It is the responsibility of the organization's Internal Audit and Business Continuity functions to ensure that all of the organization's business continuity plans are tested and reviewed on a periodic basis to spot incorrect assumptions, oversights or changes to equipment, and employees and to identify any changes in business requirements not reflected in specific plans. Any undocumented requirements must immediately be documented. In addition, appropriate information owners and users must be informed of updates to plans.”

• The following testing techniques must be used to ensure the continuity plan can be executed in a real-life emergency:
• Table-top testing: Discussing how business recovery arrangements would react by using example interruptions such as ransomware.
• Simulations: Training individuals by simulating a crisis and rehearsing their post-incident/crisis management roles .
• Technical recovery testing: Testing to ensure information systems can be restored effectively.
• Testing recovery at an alternate site: Running business processes in parallel with recovery operations at an off-site location.
• Test of supplier facilities and services: Ensuring externally provided services and products will meet the contract requirements in the case of interruptions.
• Complete rehearsals: Testing to ensure the organization, employees, equipment, facilities and processes can cope with interruptions.

The best practices talk about a BCCM that will be periodically updated. Periodic is not continuous. Change is the key factor here.

What changes take place in your organization between these periodic updates?

How could any organization accurately account for all the changes to the organization in between BCCM updates? The fact is that they can’t.

This will change over time as organizations figure out that this is now as vital a business component as Accounts Receivable. The BCCM will become a core process of the organization if it is not already, dynamically evolving by the minute as new change-based factors take place in the enterprise.

As new or terminated employees, suppliers and partners come and go into the BCCM process, the threat profile is updated in real-time.

This takes the operational management that much closer to C², or “Continuous Continuity”.

The enterprise today that understands the myriad of potential threats to its people, processes, systems and structures, stands to be better equipped for sustained continuity of Operational Risk Management and business operations.

Human Dialogue: "Decision Advantage"​ of a Trusted Digital Globe...

How will you innovate with your front line team this month and this year to enable more accurate and resourceful “TrustDecisions”?

The ability to make business decisions in a standardized process simultaneously wrapped around our own human intelligence is the real advantage.

A true “Decision Advantage” in a world of constantly changing conditions and data environments is one of the greatest challenges within our global Leadership Management.

Creating innovation around decision making may sound like a lofty goal. It is, and yet for your particular team or organization, it certainly is within reach.

How might your team utilize a process and method for making more rapid and effective “TrustDecisions” across your global enterprise?

While these words are being written by a human-being now and not an Ai such as C h a t G P T, our future lives will encompass a continuous process to gain a digital assets advantage.

“But we will not function successfully if the war for control of those assets is lost. The battlefield, however, is the one on which trust is to be gained or lost—trust in the information we use, trust in the infrastructures that support us, and trust in the decisions we make in a digital world.” Achieving Digital Trust - Jeffrey Ritter

A process that is focused on digital truth will require our continuous application of “Operational Risk Management” combined with our global data governance collaboration.

• Have you this week in the United States tried to unsubscribe from an e-mail list and did not find a digital link at the bottom of your e-mail to accomplish this?
• Have you this week scheduled a 45 min Digital Zoom meeting and found yourself at min 44 without a decision?
• Have you this week been taking depositions in California regarding the use of videos on your platform that are covered by Section 230?

"From the Board Room to our modern day asymmetric battlefield, achieving digital trust will open eyes. It will provide us with a reference model that management and software architects have been seeking for decades.

The survival of the Internet as we know it, is currently at stake. Leadership shall provide a look into the transparency of «Trust Decisions» and how ensuring digital truth will shape our global governance for decades to come."

Innovation with making accurate and resourceful “TrustDecisions” will go far beyond technology or Zeros and Ones.

Our future will require so much more that will not be digital.

Think Human Dialogue.

It will require more “TrustDecisions” that are in person, Face-to-Face, Eye-to-Eye and finalized with a hand shake…

Onward! 

4D: Extraordinary Risk…

As we gathered up our gear to walk out to the Bell 407 for another epic day one February in the remote mountains, you could just feel the “butterflies” in our gut again.

When you think of any challenging mission that has real risks, you and your team know that when you launch that daily objective and buckle up, that you have each others backs. Got your six.

You as a team have already trained to identify the risks, “Deter, Detect, Defend and Document” the environment you are operating within, that particular day.

"The helicopter now rapidly gained altitude and we looked at each other across the aisle with smiles on our faces. Our goggles made it hard to see each others eyes, but you could feel the adrenaline starting to take effect."

Now it’s all about, the person to your right and left, keeping each other in your peripheral vision to know that s/he is still there.

It was just another day in pursuit of the daily mission, accelerating down the mountain on our skis in endless powder snow.

Until it happened. Passing to close to the “tree well,” the edge caved in and now you could feel yourself falling down the deep hole around the trunk of the massive pine tree.

Catching your breath and now looking up, you could see the dark blue sky yet the surface was 6-7 feet vertical and you just hugged the tree in sub-freezing temperatures.

Then pure silence and just deep snow surrounding you and the tree well.

In the next minute, you realize you are in the red zone of risk and now your OPS training kicks in. Your thoughts wonder if you will ever make it back.

About 30 minutes later, you could hear our team yelling out and blowing their whistles. By now, that bright yellow plastic whistle we all kept around our necks was now being blown louder than ever before.

Finally, as someone from our Team, heard the whistle cadence of distress you could hear their voices getting even closer!

What are you doing down there our leader yelled out! As they threw down the bright orange knotted rope…

So what?

Do you have a “4D” Risk Strategy being utilized in your organization and with your team?

A "4D" Risk Strategy for Survival is only effective if it is operating on a continuous basis. You must create the culture and the due diligence to see that it becomes part of the fabric of your organization internally and with outsourced partners or suppliers.

Only then will the attacker (or nature) realize that this combination to Deter, Detect, Defend and Document is alive and growing in your enterprise. This is when attackers become discouraged, afraid, uncertain and ultimately ready for a new and less formidable adversary.

"Attackers use tools to exploit a vulnerability to create an action on a target that produces an unauthorized result, to obtain their objective. These "4D" lessons should put you on the way to creating a more survivable business.”

Whether you are at 9,000+ feet in the snow capped mountains in a foreign country or you are just sitting in your dark corporate conference room on “Chain Bridge Road” innovating to try and solve todays risk problem-sets does not matter.

Whether you and your particular team, devotes 1 hour, 1 day or 1 week to a potential threat risk to you or your organization training for “What If,” is what truly will make a future difference.

Operational Risk Management (ORM) will determine whether you ultimately just survive, or become:

Extraordinary adjective

1 a : going beyond what is usual, regular, or customary

       extraordinary powers

Believe: You Are Not Alone...

You have questions just as many will, about why me, why now? The world we live in here on Earth is only a small example of one of our real miracles.

No matter what your future challenges are that await you in your particular life, remember what you have learned so far.

Make your best innovative decisions with the people you love and with faith.

Look up.

When was the last time you looked at the pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)?

Our small lives here in our own families are where it all begins. How you as an individual decide to become a better Brother, Sister or even Father, or Mother.

Now take the time machine back to the early-nineties and standing in the driveway on a late afternoon in San Clemente, CA near Halloween, picture a 6-year old Sister and 4-year old Brother, that were showing off their excellent costumes.

In the picture, She has her arms around her younger brother, who is in his “Power Ranger Space Suit” costume and she is modeling in her most Barbie-fashionable off-the-shoulder pant suit.

Remember those times of fun and happiness with family? Even after 25+ years later…it is truly amazing.

“Life is not in our hands. We can only prepare for a life that will be uncertain. Train and learn for those most challenging times. Love and pray for those times that will surprise us.”

What do you think about, when you look at the snapshot of the “Tarantula Nebula” light-years away?

Think back and consider how much you have accomplished, where you have traveled and what you have learned in your journey so far.  Believe.

Future Risk: Life Endeavors…

Remember that point in your life around 16 or 17 in high school when you had that question and talk with your parents, or even a school counselor?

What are your plans for going to college after you graduate they would ask?

How did you answer that question?

Like many, you had no idea.  Remember taking the SAT or the ACT and all the pressure on you to do well on this scholastic test?

Then the point came along when the results were in, and you and your parents started making decisions on “Where” you would go to college.

Perhaps you took a weekend together to go visit some town to tour a university campus.  The journey together was enlightening.

You then began to really understand from your parents what was possible.  What they wanted.

Well, what did you want?

The goal was to be far enough away from the parents, so they could not just drop by to say hi or for a quick surprise visit.

Did you ever hear, you are going to have to work and pay for your own college?

Thinking back to that time, maybe you had only one choice.

Yet now that you are a college graduate in your thirties and beyond, maybe you too have reflected on your own choices then.

Are you working every day now to pay the bills and to save up for your next major vacation or putting away savings for your next investment?

So what?

Are you planning your next life accomplishment that will make a difference for you and those you care so much about, or in a decade from now?

Thinking back, there was never a clear warning on global impact events such as 9/11 and War, the 2007-2008 financial crisis or a recent health pandemic or drought.

"Whether you have now survived the “War on Terror” or the greatest economic and job loss crisis since the “Great Depression” of 1929 or some natural environmental disaster does not truly matter."

Maybe a routine medical procedure recommended to relieve pain or to fix and old injury.  

Maybe it is just a 20 minute car drive to school or work.

What you need to really realize now, is that your own personal “Operational Risks” are with you every second of every minute of every hour of your life.

How you as an individual manage risks and become more resilient each day, to the inevitable future challenges, events and people you will encounter in your life, is your decision and in your complete control.

Some individuals will know this better than others.  Based upon the answers they heard from their high school counselors and also a parent growing up.

These are the same adults in your life, who have also endured and sacrificed so much, to make the world a better place for you.

Godspeed…

Emergence: Mission of Mutual Purpose…

Gazing across San Diego Bay to Coronado Island once again, the USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) was in port in the distance.

When you think about people focused on TEAM WORK and delivering significant outcomes in an “Infinite Game” what comes to your mind?

Whether you are thousands of dedicated crew members or 90 US Naval Aviators operating a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier with 2 A4W nuclear reactors on board does not matter.

Maybe it is 2000 prominent “Independent Contractors” across the bay working together on a “Just Cause” to serve like-minded others. Yet one factor must be continuously present.

"A clear and trusted purpose that guides your actions each day. A purposeful mission that gives you confidence that all of the time and dedication is from the heart."

If you witness thousands of people in the spirit of collaboration building new relationships and working side-by-side continuously towards a future vision it is epic.

Extending beyond the usual or ordinary especially in size or scope, is truly worth witnessing and feeling the experience.

You know when you have found your place in life. You feel the need to trust your leadership and their guidance into the future.

So what?

Those who have found their tribe, their peer group, those who you would sacrifice with and do anything to support the mission are ever so valuable.

As we head into 2023 and these next few years past a world pandemic, you can only wonder what our next challenges in our lives will be.

Your purpose on our Earth is already decided. Think about how you arrived where you are today.

As you make choices in your life to say “Yes or to say “No,” these decisions have made all the difference.

You will say both to navigate through your life yet your course of knowing what is right and what is wrong, who you trust and who you don’t and how your life unfolds is yet to be finally determined.

Your “Peace of Mind” and “Faith of Spirit” will come when you too finally believe, that the course set by your navigator and your true destiny is already written.

Fly with confidence my fellow team mate, as you are forever loved…

Innovation: In Search of "New"​...

Some of our worlds greatest leaders, scientists, researchers, programmers, instructors, journalists, quiet professionals and entrepreneurs recognize innovation when they see it, hear it and they experience “New”.

They are searching for it. “New” is worth more time to explore its possibilities and the potential change before us. Will you become more curious in search of “New”?

In 2023, people across our world will encounter “New” with more enthusiasm, curiosity and will recognize that anything is possible.

The optimism and the business opportunity is before all of us. To explore more often. To ask more open ended questions. To build new relationships in places and with others, you never truly anticipated in your past.

Simultaneously, the business models of the past are still so relevant. Do not forget the value and the need to build a singular relationship through focused dialogue.

The innovations of 2023 will come to us, through more effective time Face-to-Face.

Yes, one-to-one, whether in-person or even over your favorite digital audio/visual tool does not matter.

A devoted time to build relationships 1-to-1 with others, will create “New”:

• New Discovery.
• New Understanding.
• New Empathy.
• New Insights.

How might you spend more time this year in true dialogue, with other people you could learn from? For your learning and new perception.

How might your deliberate use of open questions allow for your new discovery? For your new inspiration.

How might you listen to others in a way that allows you to learn more? For your new ambitions.

You see, you are now a future “Innovation Navigator”.

You might not realize this yet in your life, however time will tell us the truth.

Others you will meet in person. Others you will have dialogue with soon enough in your future, will make all the difference to you.

Your work reading and questioning and your time devoted to “New,” will make all the difference in your modern life, and in joy with others.

For you and for all mankind…Onward!

Twenty 23: For All Mankind…

Remember where you were 365 days ago.

2023 is now at our global doorstep. What journey will you embark on this next year to grow your skills and your knowledge?

How might you as an experiential learning enthusiast, leverage what you know to help others on your team, and in your community?

Your mission has always been to improve, to perfect and to deliver results. In 2023, what if you began looking through a different innovation lens?

Look around. What does your personal environment of your own dwelling say about you? Is there any room for change or improvement?

How would you rate your realm of relationships with family, friends and relatives this New Years Eve? Think about it…

Now transition to your community and assess whether you are in the right neighborhood, the correct city and even in the best state in the USA for your profession, and the work you are now inspired to perform.

"2023 will become a pivotal year for you in so many ways."

Our global future is bright and your next focus will be all about your contributions to a greater good in this world.

• With over 9 billion web-enabled personal digital devices in global circulation, how we learn from the Internet and new quantum Information Technology will continue to amaze all of us.
• Our Earth is sending us signals on regular intervals that our natural disasters are truly accelerating.
• Will mass global population growth continuously change our supply chains for food, mining of rare earth elements and sharing our scarce fresh water?

"Look up in the early evening clear blue sky as the sun sets. See all those shining stars beyond our Moon."

“For All Mankind”

have a more meaningful 2023.