Handover

My dad can juggle.  I don’t know why I never learned to juggle from him (ok, maybe because it’s HARD and when I was 4 my futile attempts did not invoke any desire to perfect the art), but I like to think that I took his skill for handling flaming torches, knives, apples, and anything else he could ferret away from the dinner table, and turned it into a metaphorical skill.  Maybe they’re not related at all.  But since I’m writing, I’m going to have myself a field day.

In MSF, the passing of a position from one person to another is fraught with snags, inefficiencies, miscommunications, last-minute advice, fatigue, social posturing, and general good cheer.  There are a lot of balls that can get dropped.

As logisticians, we have a hundred balls in the air.  Spell check never seems to identify the word logistician (try it), so I define it as ‘details.’  It’s a pretty good substitute in most sentences.  “I’ll figure out the logistics with him tomorrow.”  “Take care of the logistics of sending that down.”  “You cover the logistics of the air conditioner.”  I figure out the details.  Of everything.   Everything is my job, and everything is my problem.  From supply to electricity to movement to temperature, every detail is another ball in the air.  Us logisticians, and our teams, get a hundred balls up in the air, passing them between ourselves, managing their trajectories, and keeping our limited resources (our hands, in this metaphor) assigned to the necessary task only for the amount of time it takes (we can’t have our hands full.  Juggling with your hands full sounds pretty hard).  Each logistician can juggle a huge number of balls in a complicated pattern.

Then they have to hand it over.

So, I’m metaphorically good at juggling a lot of balls.  I throw them pretty high, touching them less often than normal, and I dole them out to my team.  I’ve got a pretty intricate pattern, with very fast hands, that I work well with (this is all metaphorical, people).  I bet no one else really likes my pattern.  I don’t particularly like other people’s pattern, either.  So handover is the time of blending the patterns, a time of collaboration and cross-pollination (wow, I like that wrist-flick, or, I didn’t think of behind the back!), but mostly a time of not crashing the two patterns to make all the balls drop. 

In reality, the two patterns never have to actually co-exist.  So handover is also a time of quiet head-nodding and teeth gritting.  The inertia of the balls and their current pattern is seen in the national staff, who have to go about changing a huge system of 100 juggling balls, pins, flaming torches, chain saws, and knives into something new, different, and not guaranteed to work.  Every 9 months.  Handover is not their favorite time.

Needless to say, some balls get dropped.  The important part is to drop balls, not chain saws, and to not toss the bowling ball to the baby.  I’m not sure what that last part translates to, non-metaphorically, but it sounds good.