On reflection

With some days behind me now, from the trip to the Bay area re folks and their interest (or lack thereof) in historical topics, I've begun to appreciate more the context of Jenny's answer.  It isn't that history needs to be abandoned in order to chase "current problems" but rather than it needs to be woven into context so that the Lessons Learned feel relevant to today's challenges.  Duh....

It led me to reflect on a conversation many years ago with Debbie Ogden, a young woman engineer in our HP Colorado Springs lab (mygawd, that must have been a while ago).  She asked, "What did you do differently that led to your becoming our Engineering Manager?"

I hadn't stopped to think about that--but the answer came pretty easily.  Three things--

(1) I opened a retail plant nursery 'on the side' and found out through that experience that cash matters, when I couldn't make payroll one month.  As I checked at HP, it turned out that they had similar issues, I'd just never thought about my job in terms of how it affected HP's cash flow

(2) I got a history degree to add to my physics and electrical engineering degrees.  No other candidate had a history degree, and while it wasn't in the job spec, the perspective of having history training was powerful in terms of appreciating that 'nothing new happens under the sun' and if you can learn from the previous mistakes of others (or their successes), it might be cheaper and faster than having to repeat the same stumbles.

(3) I joined the Colorado Air Pollution Commission, a task which presumed a lot more knowledge in a lot of fields (e.g. atmospheric photochemistry, and pulmonary epidemiology) than I had, or for that matter, that any other member had.  The conclusion I reached was that to be effective you not only had to learn to ask intelligent questions in a field about which you were a novice, but you had to be able to discern good answers from bullshit.  This is a most valuable skill to acquire for lots of life, and while I wasn't all that good at it (then or now), I began to have much more appreciation for the value of approaching problems from this standpoint.

I recall Debbie's jaw dropping, and her eyes staring at me as though I had three heads.  She said, "Wow, how did you think to do all that?"  And for that, I had no answer.   I still don't.

But, tonight (actually early this morning, sitting in Albuquerque during the annual Balloon Races because our SHOT (Society for the History Of Technology) annual conference is here right now, the question posed by Jenny seems ever more relevant--how do you weave the value of history's lessons with the issues, situations, and challenges of today in a way that helps give insight and actionable steps?  That would be the magic elixir.