I have always been the one with a plan.

Not necessarily because I wanted to be.

There have been plenty of times I’ve envied people who could simply fly by the seat of their pants and assume everything would work itself out.

My brain apparently did not come equipped with that setting. 😂

Even when I was young, I tended to think beyond what was happening right now to what might happen next.

If I went to a party where everyone was drinking, I might grab a beer, dump part of it out and carry the rest around. I could still be part of the group without giving up control of myself.

That probably tells you more about me than I intended. 😉

I liked math in school for much the same reason.

For the most part, there was an answer.

Not twelve interpretations of the answer.

Not “it depends.”

Here is the problem.

Work through it.

Find the answer.

I liked that.

Somewhere along the way, that way of thinking became one of the things I was very good at professionally.

My work wasn’t simply about numbers.

A single project could involve legal, construction, engineering, financial advisors, bond counsel, underwriters, banks and District staff.

Each one had their piece.

But somebody had to see the whole thing.

Somebody had to understand what needed to happen, who needed to do it, what had to happen first, what depended on something else being finished and what could happen if one piece didn’t happen when it was supposed to.

That was often me.

I could usually see the whole picture before anyone else thought to look for it.

At the time, I don’t know that I thought of that as a particular skill.

It was simply how my brain worked.

See the pieces.

See the connections.

Think through the possible outcomes.

Figure out the practical plan.

Then make sure the pieces actually move.

Thirty-five years of doing that leaves a mark.

Which brings me to something I absolutely did not see coming.

Artificial intelligence.

Hello, AI. 😂

If you’d shown me my retirement life several years ago—taking AI courses, building apps, experimenting with agents, studying business processes and starting a consulting company—I might have wondered exactly how I got from there to here.

On the surface, it looks like a fairly dramatic turn.

Except it isn’t.

The technology is new.

My curiosity isn’t.

Neither is the part of me that immediately looks at something and asks:

How does this work?

What could it do?

Where could it go wrong?

Does this actually solve the problem?

And could we make the whole thing work better?

AI happens to give that part of my brain an enormous new playground.

And apparently it likes playgrounds. 😂

But the more I learn, the more familiar some of this feels.

Not the technology itself. That’s changing faster than any reasonable person can keep up with.

It’s the thinking behind what I’m doing with it.

When I look at a business process now, I don’t begin by asking, Where can we put AI?

I want to see the whole thing.

What are you trying to accomplish?

Where does the process break down?

What are people doing manually that doesn’t need to be manual?

Where are the bottlenecks?

What does one person need from another before she can do her part?

What happens if this piece fails?

Sometimes AI may help.

Sometimes the answer may simply be a better process.

That feels remarkably similar to work I’ve done before.

Different tools.

Different setting.

Same brain.

Maybe that’s one of the interesting things about discovering something new later in life.

From the outside, it can look like we’ve suddenly taken off in an entirely different direction.

But if we look closely enough, we may find a thread.

Something we’ve always been drawn to.

A way of thinking.

A strength we used somewhere else.

An interest we didn’t have time to follow.

A skill we didn’t even recognize as a skill because it came naturally to us.

That doesn’t mean everything from an earlier chapter needs to come with us.

Thank goodness.

There are responsibilities that end.

Roles we outgrow.

Expectations we can finally put down.

Things that mattered once and simply don’t anymore.

But making room for something new isn’t the same thing as throwing away everything that came before.

Sometimes the new thing gives us a completely different place to use something that has been there all along.

I don’t need to become someone new to do something new.

I’m still not entirely sure where all of this leads.

That’s okay.

I’m rather enjoying finding out.

Because apparently the woman who once had to keep lawyers, engineers, bankers, construction people and District staff moving in the same direction has now discovered artificial intelligence.

This should be interesting. 😉

Maybe the question isn’t:

Who am I going to become?

Maybe it’s:

What else might I do with everything I’ve already become?

I don’t know where that question leads.

I’m rather glad I don’t.

There are still plenty of blank pages ahead.

But they’re attached to a book that’s already full of stories.

I think I’ll keep them. ❤️