Manage your Inspectations

Another 'hearing' from that same job (where I drove to the moon and back over 6 years (not literally)) came from a training course on insurance and its use in large construction projects. Zzzzzzzzz. But it wasn't dull at all thanks to being delivered by a very charismatic ex-fireman who had seen his fair share of preventable loss. At one point in one of his stories illustrating a particular point, he said in passing, You get what you Inspect, not what you Expect. Slap! Inspect and Expect are not often found in the same bed but here they were lying together in a natty little sentence with gigantic truth. Get the work done up-front and avoid the misery and stress of hours of untangling the incompetence or incomprehension of others after everything has gone poo-shaped. I was already quite good at this particular job because of a natural personality flaw that expected things to go wrong rather than right but I do believe that jockeying this little sentence made me better. I used this 'hearing' a lot to make the 'I'm going to check up on you because I'd be daft just to trust what you tell me' accusation more comfortable to bear. I had it quoted back at me many times. It turns out that even the expectation of inspection (it took everything in my willpower not to write 'expectation of inspectation' here!) has a material effect on the actions of others. By the way, thanks to this post, Inspectation has now entered my diction - and is included in the title of this post!