Picture it. Idaho. 1983. 

My baby brother was just big enough to follow me outside. We had 2 acres in the middle of nowhere. And it was the 80s, so we were completely unsupervised.

We also lived in the high desert, so naturally my favorite thing to play with was water.

I would spend hours making "rivers" and acting as the all powerful god of the land – creating hills, valleys, boulders and trees for the water to have to go around. I made dams, waterfalls, and ponds. My only regret was that I couldn't actually make real weather aside from the rain that came from my watering can.

What I was really playing with was making small changes and observing what the water did about it. What actually forces water to stop? What happens when water backs up? How does the dirt change if you put rocks down? What makes water go fast or slow? I learned that the water will tell you the shape of the land better than any sense I possess. 

I was very lucky to have parents who encouraged this play – even digging me a huge (to me) sandbox right next to the hose bib. Or maybe that was to keep me out of the driveway.

As an adult, I found work that lets me do something very similar. Operations is stream manipulation at human scale. How do you make things go faster or slower? What happens if you remove this obstacle, or add that one? Where do you place people to have the most impact on the productivity of the team? 

I've been incredibly fortunate to have many leaders who let me ask weird questions and didn't shut me down. They encouraged me to work with other leaders in my org to solve the problems that needed more hands and heads. I've taken on special projects to explore topics that come out of those questions. And often what I end up asking is this: Is what we are measuring really giving us the information we need? What things can we stop doing entirely to free up capacity for the company?

It's often not about adding more water. It's about moving the edges of the river bed, reshaping the land, or simply walking around the river to see the other side. 

And just like as a kid, I can spend hours doing it. There is something so tremendously satisfying about reaching a point of understanding of a system where you can feel the water moving. If you look at it just the right way you know when you are paying attention to the right things. It's simply mesmerizing. The person really paying attention to the system will know to trust the water to tell them the shape of the land.

In this slack water moment, I find myself feeling the edges of all the systems I operate inside. All the systems I've tried to navigate in the past and have failed me. It's like I want to find their eddies and smooth them out. I want to know what questions haven't been asked, the questions that hint at the edges of the systems where the real change can happen. I'm enjoying this time to study, read, interact with, and write about the world I live in.

I am glad I can't go back and tell tiny Sarah that her river building will lead to a career in tech. Even she knew you can't put water on a computer. But I do think she'd be thrilled that we grew up to play with problems and figure out where they come from. I'm certainly not ready to go back to work yet. But I love that I'm defining the shape of the work I love to do.