In a Virtual Machine Cluster, you are constantly turning servers on and off and sometimes those server images are remain off for a prolonged period of time. When you bring them up you start to notice that they have drifted from the initial configuration and haven’t been “around” for all the changes that have taken place around them.
Sometimes this happens in your professional life as well, you leave a project partway through only to come back and realize that things have drifted from their original goals. Where you thought the direction the project was headed in, was not actually where it is going any more.
This is the Drift – the space between what you know and what is starts to take hold.
Concerns with the Drift emerge when the space between what you thought and what is grows to the degree that you can no longer remember where you came from or where you started, where empty glances around the conference room search each other trying to understand “How did we get here?”.
It’s not always a single mass event that gets you there, but a series of little events that build up that slowly take you off point and start to steer you in another direction.
So the question then becomes – how do you navigate the Drift, bringing it back to your centre? What are the steps that you take to bring yourself and your team back to being on point and focussing on what is important.
For every project and/or person those steps are completely different but the first step to navigating the Drift is acknowledging with you and your team that you have drifted and working to come back to the centre… sans engaging in the Blame Game.
