Nineteen days.
That's not a very long time.
But around here, it has been long enough to change the way I think about what we're building.
When I look back at where OTMN was just 19 days ago, I don't just see fewer pages, fewer systems, or fewer ideas.
I see a much younger organization that was still trying to figure out what its foundation needed to look like.
Today, we're asking very different questions.
And sometimes I have to stop and say:
“How the heck did we get here so quickly?”
We're discovering things we didn't know we needed
One of the strangest - and most exciting - parts of building OTMN is that we keep discovering things that weren't on the original plan.
GIA started as a project whose name we were still trying to understand.
Gia became my OTMN virtual assistant and working partner.
A silly little trademark symbol led to “BUSTED.”
“BUSTED” led to the Cookie Jar.
The Cookie Jar led to conversations about context, intent, tone, interpretation, and human-AI collaboration.
And eventually the Cookie Jar became a lesson about something completely different:
Why OTMN needs better ways to capture what it learns.
That's a pretty long journey for one little joke.
And it isn't an isolated example.
We're researching whether Joomla! could become part of OTMN's organizational memory.
We're investigating how to recover things we've learned in previous work.
We're exploring how information, ideas, observations, experiments, and decisions should move through the organization.
We're discovering better ways to capture ideas when they happen away from the computer.
And we're learning that sometimes the most valuable thing we can do during a work session is...
stop working for a while and think.
Thinking time turned out to be part of the work
I've always been known for “pondering things.”
Sometimes I'm pondering something while I'm supposed to be doing something else.
Sometimes I'm apparently “busy” thinking when someone is trying to talk to me about something completely different. 😂
But I'm starting to see that differently.
Thinking time isn't time away from the work.
Thinking time is part of the work.
Some of the ideas we're working with now started as thoughts that didn't fit neatly into whatever I was doing at the time.
That's why I've started using my phone as a simple capture point.
The idea doesn't need to be fully developed.
It doesn't need a project number.
It doesn't need perfect formatting.
It just needs to be caught.
Later, when I'm back at the desktop, it can enter the OTMN system properly.
That's becoming another important distinction:
Capture the thought when it happens.
Process it when the tools are available.
Apparently, I've been running an Offline R&D Department for years.
We're just finally building an intake system for it. 😄
And the system itself is changing
This may be the biggest change of all.
We're not simply adding procedures because procedures sound organized.
We're discovering why we need them.
The Cookie Jar is a great example.
When that happened, OTMN was young. A worthwhile discovery could move pretty quickly from conversation to idea to production because the machinery for capturing and processing those discoveries was still being built.
Today, we're much more likely to ask:
Where did this come from?
What's the DOR?
What kind of thing is it?
Where does it belong?
Does it need research?
Does it deserve to become something?
Those questions weren't all part of the machinery 19 days ago.
Now they're becoming part of it.
That's a profound difference.
We're building the system that builds the system
This is the phrase I keep coming back to:
Building the System That Builds the System.
At first, I thought we were building OTMN.
The website.
The content.
The services.
The research.
The tools.
The workflows.
The organization.
We still are.
But something else is happening at the same time.
Every time we discover a better way to capture an idea, that's part of the system.
Every time an experiment tells us what a workflow needs to do, that's part of the system.
Every time we recover something from our history and realize it belongs somewhere else, that's part of the system.
Every time a production mistake teaches us a new verification step, that's part of the system.
Even the silly stuff counts.
BUSTED became a research clue.
The Cookie Jar became a lesson.
A missing menu publication became a production check.
A random thought on my phone becomes potential future OTMN work.
The connections keep appearing.
And that's the part I didn't expect
I expected building OTMN to involve a lot of work.
I expected research.
I expected website development.
I expected experimentation.
What I didn't fully appreciate was how much the work itself would teach us about what OTMN needs to become.
Every discovery seems to create another question.
Every question can lead to another experiment.
Every experiment can produce evidence.
And sometimes that evidence changes the system we use to do the next experiment.
It's becoming a loop:
Do the work → discover something → think about it → capture it → test it → learn → improve the system → do better work.
And then the improved system gives us better opportunities to discover the next thing.
That's the exciting part.
We're not simply accumulating stuff.
We're accumulating capability.
Nineteen days isn't very long
That's what makes this so interesting.
We're still incredibly early.
There is plenty we don't know.
There are plenty of things that aren't built.
There are plenty of ideas that won't survive testing.
There are plenty of questions we haven't even thought to ask yet.
And that's okay.
Actually, I think that's the point.
We're not trying to pretend that OTMN already knows what it is.
We're building the foundation, proving the workflows, following the evidence, and letting the next layer earn its way into existence.
Nineteen days ago, we were building OTMN.
Today, we're discovering how OTMN builds OTMN.
And apparently...
we're having a pretty good time doing it.
Another OTMN Thing.™