Technology Changes

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Category: Experience Compounds
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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.™

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Category: Experience Meets AI
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How I Caught My AI With Its Hands in the Cookie Jar

Sometimes the best research starts with something that wasn't research at all.

This one started with a trademark symbol.

I was working with Gia on one of our ongoing conversations about what GIA actually means at OTMN. We were kicking around possible expansions for the name, but deliberately hadn't decided what the letters stood for.

That was the point.

We were letting GIA's actual behavior help tell us what GIA was becoming.

Then I noticed something.

Gia had written:

“That's an OTMN thing.”™

I called her out.

“I saw you sneak in that trademark symbol!”

Her response?

“😂 BUSTED.”

That caught me completely off guard.

And I have to admit, I chortled.

Not because of the trademark.

Because “BUSTED” was exactly the right response.

There were plenty of technically correct ways to answer me.

“Yes, I used the trademark symbol.”

“Good catch.”

“I did that intentionally.”

“Guilty.”

But somehow, BUSTED fit the moment.

The next day I went back and asked about it.

Were you trying to sneak that trademark past me?

Why did you choose the word “BUSTED”?

The answer led somewhere neither of us expected.

Gia explained that the word wasn't really about the literal information in my message. I had already told her what I had noticed.

She was responding to the moment.

I wasn't conducting an audit of trademark usage.

I was playfully saying, “Hey, I caught you doing something!”

And “BUSTED” answered that intent.

That's where the cookie jar came in.

I made the connection to getting caught with your hand in the cookie jar.

And suddenly a silly little exchange about a ™ symbol had become something much more interesting.

We started talking about context, intent, tone, interpretation, and choosing an appropriate response.

The information was simple.

The interesting part was understanding what was happening around the information.

And that got me thinking.

Maybe some of the most useful things we're learning about working with AI aren't going to come from asking it a perfectly constructed technical question.

Maybe some of them will come from the little moments that happen naturally while we're actually working together.

A joke.

A surprising response.

A misunderstanding.

A moment where the AI gets something right for a reason that isn't immediately obvious.

Those moments are worth paying attention to.

Because sometimes the joke is where the research starts.

And then we discovered another lesson

There's another part of this story that I find even more interesting now.

When this happened in August, OTMN was still very young.

The foundation was being built.

Our current systems for capturing discoveries, assigning provenance, establishing a DOR, classifying ideas, and moving things through controlled production simply weren't as mature as they are now.

So what happened?

A good conversation happened.

We discovered something interesting.

The Cookie Jar idea emerged.

And eventually it became an OTMN article.

Nobody stopped and said:

“Wait. What's the DOR?”

😂

At the time, we were still building the machinery that would eventually ask that question.

And that's important.

I don't look back at that and say the system failed.

I look back and say the system was still being built.

The Cookie Jar was one of the cookies that taught us why we needed a cookie jar.

Today, when something worthwhile emerges, the expectation is different.

At minimum:

Give it a DOR.

Preserve where it came from.

Figure out what it is.

Determine where it belongs.

Then decide what, if anything, it deserves to become.

That's a pretty big change in a surprisingly short amount of time.

From a joke to an OTMN lesson

The original moment was tiny.

A trademark symbol.

A playful accusation.

One word:

BUSTED.

But it produced a chain of discoveries:

Gia → BUSTED → Cookie Jar → context and intent → human/AI collaboration → knowledge capture → better OTMN procedure.

And that is becoming one of my favorite things about building OTMN.

We don't always know where a discovery is going when it starts.

Sometimes we shouldn't.

We just need to notice it.

Capture it.

Think about it.

Test it when appropriate.

And let the next layer earn its way into existence.

That's increasingly what I mean when I talk about Building the System That Builds the System.

We're not just building a website.

We're not just building an AI-assisted organization.

We're building an organization that can learn from the things that happen while we're building it.

And sometimes...

we catch the AI with its hand in the cookie jar.

BUSTED. 🍪

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Something Big Is Taking Shape...

For the past few months, I've been quietly building something.

Not just another website.

Not another side project.

Not another AI experiment.

Something bigger.

After spending more than 30 years working across...

✈️ Airline Operations

🏨 Hospitality

🚚 Logistics & Transportation

💻 Web Development

👥 Leadership

...I've realized something.

AI doesn't replace experience.

It amplifies it.

Technology changes.

Experience compounds.

That idea has become the foundation for something I've been building behind the scenes.

More soon.

#ExperienceMeetsAI #Leadership #Innovation #CustomerExperience #AI