doug smith training

  Have you ever wondered where all the common sense went?  What we often take for granted as easy to grasp knowledge goes unacknowledged by all too many people. What once was common has become uncommon: courtesy, flexibility, resilience, determination, perseverance...if these traits were ever common they have slipped into rare supply. Or have they? It depends on what you're looking for. It depends on what you are modeling. Wouldn't common sense be hardest to find by those who aren't practicing common sense? It makes me wonder. It also matters how we define common sense. Just because it feels right to me doesn't mean that it makes any sense to you. Our perspective does still matter. Common sense is easily confused with common bias. We see things the way we see things because that's the way we see things. That both makes no sense at all and yet defines sense-making. Or does it? What to do with all that?  Be careful about what you expect, because you'll get a lot o...

Calling something "common sense" doesn't mean that you don't need it. We're never finished learning. What have you learned today? -- Doug Smith

When you're working on a project, do you ever wonder why common sense is in such short supply? People make mistakes that seem silly. Standard procedures are sometimes ignored creating havoc. Relationships that should be sound and happy feel haggard and lost. Where IS all this common sense? When I'm the leader, I sometimes forget that not everyone shares my same view of common sense. Not everyone on the team has experienced the kinds of things that lead me to believe that certain project concepts are common sense and so they don't share that view. We all have places in our work that seem simple to us but more complicated to others. Just because something is common sense doesn't mean that people are doing it. We may need to tell them about our version of common sense. We may need to make processes fool-proof. We need to make things easy. The next time you think to yourself, "why are they missing that thing that is clearly common sense" consider the o...