I just read my last post from 4.7.2022 and became saddened about the EPIC papers I'd drawn up, because until about 3 months ago, they were still in my backpack--you know, for safe keeping. I finally took them out and decided it was time to save them and show them to the team. Well, I decided to save them by way of lamination, only to then remember that I'd drawn them with a heat-sensitive erasable pen... In that one decision, the original drawings of EPIC were gone... Whoops.
Leadership is full of moments like this. You make a decision that seems perfectly reasonable at the time, and then physics -- or in this case, thermodynamics -- steps in to remind you that expertise in one domain does not automatically transfer to another. I spent over a decade in chemical manufacturing, running operations where attention to material properties was life or death. Heat-sensitive ink never came up in a safety data sheet.
The thing is, I could have tested it. A small corner of one page, fed through the laminator first. That is essentially what test-driven development teaches you in software: before you commit to the big move, run the small experiment. Verify your assumptions. I know this. I preach this. And I still laminated the whole stack without a trial run, because I was confident. Confidence without verification is how you lose things.
This connects to something I have been thinking about a lot lately with AI agents. In Bland Confidence, I wrote about how AI produces work that looks right but fails under scrutiny. My lamination mistake is the human version of the same failure mode: acting on a plausible assumption without checking it. The ink looks permanent. The code looks correct. Neither survives the heat.
If I had those EPIC drawings today, I would photograph them first, store the digital copies, and only then consider preservation options. Not because I learned anything profound about lamination, but because I finally internalized what every good engineer already knows: the original is irreplaceable, the copy is free, and the five minutes you spend making a backup will save you from the particular kind of regret that hits when the laminator finishes and you are staring at a blank, warm sheet of plastic.
Lesson learned. The hard way. As usual.