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is seeing comprehending?


Oh yeah, visual inspections are why God gave us eyes.  There is not a single machine learning, IoT, computerized environment that can match the skills a human's brain can assess and deliver based on visual feedback. The trick is making sure that the person connected to those eyeballs actually knows what they are looking for!  Face it, aren't the best workers those that can recognize an issue long before it becomes a problem? So instead, is the challenge really not that they can visually see, but instead that they can comprehend and correlate potential challenges? While we have many different definitions for "wisdom" in context of this topic, I think about it as those individuals which have had the most experience, both good and bad. Coincidentally I am a firm believer that the best service people are those that make the most frequent mistakes. When I was in the field I had lots of experience screwing things up. The difference is that I would always check and triple check my work, for the most part nobody else saw those mistakes but me. So we add another dimension to this visual inspection paradox, if I see it and I attempted to work on it but don't double check my work is the third variable, "I just don't give a crap".



Possibly the capability of visual inspection combined with the attributes of comprehending how the pieces fit together, and topped with either a good or bad attitude, can measure up to tell you whether you have a good worker or a poor worker. In essence it's this amalgamation of variables that separate your workforce from strong to weak. A friend of mine, Haig Nalbantian, would describe these in in Mercer's internal labor market model (@mercer) as labor stocks. Value and outcomes are achieved when you can take these labor stocks; punch them through enabling tools, and flow out the other side the right combination of capabilities, attitudes and attributes which positively affect the value you have to your client. Was it Einstein who said "repeating the same process and expecting different results is the definition of insanity"? Isn't that what many of you do day in and day out as we talk about managing and optimizing workforces?  It's time for us to connect the simple act of visual inspection to the valuable components of intuition. For the most part this cannot be accomplished with individuals and instead needs to leverage tools which take in these factors to create "best performer scenarios". If we allow ourselves to only look at things across a single dimension then how are we any better than the human race prior to Christopher Columbus taking sail when the World was assumed to be flat!



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