Almost the last letter to my collaborators ... I did not leave
Just today ten days ago, as you know, I stopped signing the paperwork related to a project that kept me busy and inspired for seven years. Surely they have been waiting for an explanation, because only a couple of very close people knew about them a few days before, although it was planned from the day I decided that I would not lose my inspiration. I was waiting for the quiet night of a hotel and the decision of, if to remove or leave a couple of lines of the writing.
Yes, I will no longer coordinate command, and my opinions will only be suggestions of good intention. Someone else will take on the challenge that comes to evolve the stage of the process, without losing sight of what works, or patience for the simple things that only work to affect the mood of those who are in the field breastfeeding with honor.
I am satisfied to have built with you from scratch a strengthening model based on joint management, in which the heroes of the business are not the geo-smoked ideologues but the ordinary people who do daily tasks every day, because they are passionate about it. It is a privilege for me to have learned from three types, who taught me that they knew how to reinvent their knowledge to a scheme that began on the napkin of a restaurant, and that was fed by the discipline of those who perhaps did not understand its dimension at the beginning, why not He wants everyone to be an expert but to do what is right for them plus the complementary contribution of uncles and aunts who only deserve my respect for knowing how to combine what they know how to do masterfully.
The impressions of 300 users from two continents in my last webinar do not coincide with the way they saw me when I first raised it 7 years ago, mainly because a lot of how it would work was developed by thinking out loud on the open road, with people that more than my accomplices at this point they became "my friends". But the impressive thing about the matter is that it is not something impressive, since it does not start from innovative ideas, just from the realization of obvious routines:
- Take out of 230 temporary hiring technicians a generation of 16 whom I would recommend with my eyes closed, even with a certificate for the American embassy. Although they failed me once, because they disappointed me in the second, but to whom I would give a third chance because one day I had them in front of me, and I know exactly what I saw in their eyes that afternoon in the Quimistan Valley.
- Have an expert in cadastre implementation teach everything he knows, knowing that one day he would do without it; but convinced that I signed him for his ability to make clones with just his height.
- Convert a simple field technician into a methodological conductor that can be aware of 20 municipalities at the same time, in charge of boys who were formed just a couple of years ago; that he matured to the degree of trusting them just because he himself taught them how to use a Garmin browser to create a UTM coordinate grid.
- Break the taboo that a beautiful woman can not be a cadastre consultant with the same capabilities as a man; who can lead a team of field leperos who would eat it whole, but who do not because he earned the respect in his art to level the total station in 53 seconds, without losing the femininity of his cheto; that the afternoon split into an open town hall presenting the cadastral values of the new quinquennium and at night it recovers the sweetness of seeing itself in the mirror and feeling special for that person whom it decided to love.
- Find people who are not cadastre people, but that as they heard me talking about plots translated the method into administrative, financial, managerial processes ... it has been the best; not because we were a luxury together, but because in the mistakes of others we found our strengths to complement each other.
- Convincing the municipalities that the commonwealth can assume the roles of cadastre, and that the mayors can allocate a resource of the income they receive in an annual injection so that the cadastre is a daily action that produces development.
- Convince me on the phone that whoever is on the other end of the line is the person who will complement my smoker ideas; Who knows that 15 has years more experience than I, but that in the only way to be faithful I would be reduced to the simplicity of admiring my nonsense, for the simple curiosity to know if on this side of the canabis the whole world is crazy.
- Conduct one of the most critical stages of the process, and bring me the satisfaction that three days before leaving the law we drive was approved at the national congress in a period of distractionIs electoral.
- Find friends even in those people who have offended more than once ...
I would list more, but I will only repeat what they ... you know, although in the third person evidenced.
... where I'm going.
10 years ago I was part of a literal geofumed, in which I discovered that there is nothing better than doing what we like; as long as the inspiration lasts. I wasn't even part of that process, just the guinea pig they used to test whether it was possible to polish someone ordinary; Although for that they should send me to a Dale Carnegie course, get me a 30-day American visa, give me shoes bigger than my feet, convince me that I could do things well not for being brilliant but for the balance between discipline and stupidity.
The experience was unique; As a result of that, we were wrong together several times, but we also felt the chill that comes from winning for the first time an award for the country that almost saw us born. Almost like when Honduras beat Mexico at the Azteca. It was pleasant one day to be in front of a rest of smoked people from all over the world, telling them how we did what we could with passion, but with the conception of something that was out of its time with the technology of those years. That in the FIG of Czechoslovakia a guy who sketched the LADM Model in the abstract said… Děvky ty jsi kdo, kurva Hondurasu?
We didn't learn anything new, we just learned that the wheel is already invented. That it should not be changed, that the separation in the carriage axis is just the measure that allowed the two horses that pull it not to rub against each other and that is why now the cars have that measure. But we also learned that just that width is the train rails ... without any justification because that hulk will never be pulled by horses.
As a result of that experience, I continue to meet brilliant people in many places. So ingenious but simple and frank; I learned from them that the nobility titles of the academic layers are important only in a couple of Latin American countries; that look good in the email signature but are superfluous in the context of the obvious. I was taught to be arrogant in mid-sentence to keep the good humor, but to be cheesy in signature to remind me that self-esteem begins as the Laplace transform.
Stay there
The circumstances of life led me to sink into the guts of the municipal cadastres, to understand what people want there below and why ever from the frontdesk it was possible to put them to make cadastral maintenance in the national system.
It was so obvious, but it took being there to prove it. Because the multipurpose cadastre does not consist of the amount of data it has, but the capacity to benefit ordinary people. The municipality does not gain anything from doing a cadastre, it is hardly an expense; his business is almost always to collect taxes and for that he could not do a cadastre; thus the profit would be greater. His business is not to make land use planning plans, that is very expensive, but he needs to make people live better; for which maps painted in a pdf are not enough.
So what we did was the obvious. Make the cadastre work with recent high school graduates, with the precision that the business needed so that mayors love its cost. Convince the council members that for every dollar invested in the cadastre they could return 6 in benefits to the population. Convince ourselves that the municipalities did not even need us as experts, but as learners of the most elementary things, but that we could build a model from that that came to influence the public policies of a country.
So stay where you are. Because the gain from my contribution for you is not technical, like that AutoCAD course that week in Intibucá; They will understand that that day was to be close to everyone for the last time; to show that we did not know how to make layouts in Microstation, but that it was possible to give birth to thinking aloud. My contribution was never to solve their problems or give the blessing to whom to hire or reject; the exercise just led us to show that inspiration is enough to find talent and fruit from the most arid territories.
Stay there because Che on Facebook is right: this continent does not occupy liberators, but people who are capable of liberating themselves. Stay there because discipline in simple things will give you something to show for it. Invest time in complementing your deficiencies, your bad spelling, your unfinished university career, your little passion for reading, for research,
and above all for writing; because that is not a pleasure to stand out, rather it is a tool to organize ideas. The obvious does not take order; But our ideas should be linked in a systematic way and reflected in scribbles on a blackboard, in blog articles, in training manuals, in systematizing good practices, in conceptualizing processes ...
If for designing a cadastral file in an Excel sheet and distributing it freely, they call them; if, to update an appraisal method, they are hired to facilitate a workshop; If one day for writing in a blog, they are called from the Netherlands to moderate a panel of experts in BIM models… they tell me why that will make me happy. But do everything with passion, from clicking a point on an orthophoto to drawing a property on the third floor of a condominium: because as long as you do it inspired, you will transmit that passion to others.
And if one day you feel that there is a geofume that attracts you more than what you are doing, then take it. Because under-performance is not a sign of being blocked, it is the suggestion of concentrating the smell on something that is there, trying to remind us that there is nothing better than being inspired.
... I did not leave. I just went back to the inspiration table.
Thanks for forwarding it to the 16 that seems to be on this dedication.
With love
G!