Beware of Mountain Goats

For a long time, I had this cartoon from The Far Side hanging on the cubicle wall in my office. For me, it was a fun, illustrative way to serve as a reminder to be mindful of the painfully obvious mistakes that are right in front of you. 

That typo in a company-wide email or a spelling error on your slide deck are examples of mountain goats in the cloud bank. 

Beware of mountain goats in your cloud banks. 

One of the top skills that someone can develop is situational awareness. Having the keen ability to understand your surroundings and be able to anticipate where those hidden traps (or in this analogy mountain goats are located). 

One of the key aspects I teach people is to understand their surroundings. Be aware of the unspoken words. Good managers are like engineers and they are in tune and situationally aware of their environment. Constantly tinkering with the inputs to have their outputs refine constantly.

It is like driving a car (or flying a plane). You must be aware of everything not only in your path of driving but in your periphery as well. You are constantly adjusting the steering wheel at each slight turn or bend in the road. Move the wheel too far to the left and your car will begin to drift off course. So it is a constant movement, evaluation, adjustment as you move down the road. 

We tend to put many of our tasks into autopilot mode and we are distracted by the consistency and normalcy of it all. We need to be hyper-aware or we could one day find ourselves staring at a mountain goat in the clouds moments from an impending disaster.