A Stitch in Time

On my second day in the army many years ago we were issued with a bewildering amount of kit, including clothing, tactical gear, a rifle with magazines and a bayonet. We were going to be taught how to use all of this gear, along with machine guns, claymore mines, anti-tank rockets and other exciting noise-making ordinances. There was however one small piece of kit for which no lessons were to be held, this was the ubiquitous Sewing Kit.

I can say with certainty that the vast majority of these new soldiers had never sewn on a button or otherwise done any sewing, that’s what mothers aunts, sisters and girlfriends would have helped with in the past.

As infantry soldiers crawling through ditches diving over hedges and having the occasional encounter with barbed wire meant that running repairs on our clothing was always going to be a necessity, as was adding cloth badges correctly.

It was just expected that you figured it out yourself, asked a friend or traded some commodity, money or cigarettes for someone else to do it for you. A shoddy repair might catch the eye of the Sergeant Major, something any recruit did not really want.

So what does this have to do with business in 2022?

It has become more obvious to me in recent times that some of the smaller business applications, tools or other programs that people use daily, fall into the same category as that sewing kit. It appears that it is taken for granted, that everyone just knows how to use the technology.

During this last week in four separate online meetings, I encountered people who did not know how to record the session, dial in another person to the meeting or share their screen. One memorable person could not hear me as they had left their Bluetooth headset on their desk and were expecting to use the laptop speakers in their boardroom! All of these may appear trivial, but they are all time wasters, eating into valuable meeting time. Not to mention the “You’re on Mute” which is a subject on its own.

Many organizations run training or point their staff to where they can find the appropriate videos and other material. However with everybody’s busy lives, it’s obvious that some have not got around to undertaking the training. They just try and wing it with online meetings, and even after nearly two years of the pandemic it shows!

I’m just picking on one small technology at this stage, but this is much more common than you may think.

In the airline industry, if a particular aircraft is upgraded all pilots need to certify on that new aircraft. The software we use today gets upgrades far more regularly and although release notes are always provided, how many people actually read them understand the changes and pay attention as would a pilot?

So please get up to speed with your digital sewing kit, because as you know, a stitch in time saves nine.