I did not tell Victor about Pinnacle. This was not deception — I had no obligation to disclose my job search to a consulting client. It was professionalism: I had agreed to a defined scope and I would complete it.
The consulting work itself was the strangest kind of professional engagement I have done: returning to something you know very well, for people you have complicated feelings about, in a role with a defined end date that you are counting toward.
I met with Luke twice in the first two weeks. He was more engaged than he had been in the handover sessions. He had been, in the six weeks of managing without me, educated by the experience of not knowing what I had known. This is a real kind of learning, though an expensive one for everyone involved.
He had re-read the fourteen Alder pages. He had gone back to the specific exception from Q3 that Diane had flagged. He understood, now, what had happened and why.
In our second session he said: “I didn’t know what you were doing. Not really. I thought I understood it, but I understood it the way you understand a language you’ve read about instead of spoken.”
I said the gap between reading about a thing and doing it was most visible in the exceptions.
He said: “Because the exceptions are where the context matters.”
Yes. Exactly. The exceptions are where the seven years of Diane’s communication preferences and the specific lane’s notification protocols and the individual receiving manager’s working habits all compound into a decision that has to be made correctly in thirty minutes.