The follow-up had been harder to send than he expected. He had written it and deleted it twice before sending it because 18 months of non-response had trained him to interpret his own follow-through as a form of imposition rather than a form of legitimate persistence. Caleb responded within 4 hours of receiving the follow-up. His response was three sentences. I reviewed this thoroughly.
It's excellent work. Can you meet Thursday at 10:00? James read those three sentences four times. Then he called his wife and read them to her over the phone. She was quiet for a moment and then she said, "James, go to that meeting."
"I'm going," he said. "I know," she said. "I just wanted to say it out loud." The Thursday meeting lasted 2 hours. By the end of it, Caleb had authorized a pilot program built around James' proposal with James leading it with a team of six people and a budget that James had never in his career been trusted to manage.
It was not a favor. Caleb had gone through the proposal with the forensic attention he brought to every financial decision and had concluded based on his own analysis that the projected return justified the investment many times over. I need to ask you something, James said near the end of the meeting. "Ask," Caleb said. "Why didn't anyone look at this before?"
He said, not with bitterness. Exactly. With the genuine bewilderment of someone who has done good work and cannot make the math of its invisibility add up. I submitted it three times. I followed the process.
The work was there. Caleb was quiet for a moment because the system that was supposed to evaluate the work was evaluating something else at the same time, he said. And when a system has competing priorities, it defaults to the one that's easier to measure. James thought about this. And what was it measuring instead of the work?
He asked. "Familiarity," Caleb said, which is a lot easier to feel than to justify. James nodded slowly. "So what changed?" He asked.
Caleb looked at him. "The system got examined," he said. By someone who wasn't inside it. The pilot program launched 8 weeks later. Within 4 months, the results were ahead of the projection.