Part one. The Trail
Twelve hundred feet
Altitude is not detachment. It is the height at which the shape of the ground becomes visible.
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At ground level you can see the step in front of you in high detail, and nothing about where the path goes. From twelve hundred feet you lose the detail and gain the shape. Where the trail bends back on itself. Where two trails you thought were separate are the same trail. Operators are usually promoted for being excellent at ground level. That is not a criticism, it is how the selection works. The person who resolves the crisis is visible. The person who designed the process that produced no crisis is not. So the skill that gets someone the job is the skill they then have to stop using exclusively. Here is the practical version. Ask of any piece of work in front of you: if this happened four more times, what would that tell me? If the answer is that we were unlucky four times, you were at ground level.
At ground level you can see the step in front of you in high detail and nothing about where the path goes. From twelve hundred feet you lose the detail and gain the shape: where the trail bends back on itself, where two trails you thought were separate are the same trail, where the thing you have been walking around is small enough to cross.
Operators are usually promoted for being excellent at ground level. That is not a criticism, it is how the selection works. The person who resolves the crisis is visible, and the person who designed the process that produced no crisis is not. So the skill that gets someone the job is the skill they then have to stop using exclusively.
Altitude is not the same as distance, and it is not delegation. An operator at altitude still knows what a bad week feels like on the floor. What changes is that they stop treating each week as an event and start treating the sequence of weeks as data.
The practical version is a question you can ask about any piece of work in front of you: if this happened four more times, what would that tell me? If the answer is "that we were unlucky four times", you are at ground level. If the answer names something about how the work is designed, you have altitude on that particular thing.
Nobody has altitude on everything at once. The diagnostic exists to find out which of the eight domains you currently have it on, and the honest answer for most experienced operators is two or three.
Two things worth doing, neither of which costs anything
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