Article also Also published on LinkedIN

I had a thought. One I wanted to share. As I thought further, I realized there were a hundred different ways to get that thought out. My first inclination was to post it on my blog, then propagate it through my Twitter account, Facebook account, and my 11,000+ followers on LinkedIN. But there was a problem. The shear amount of noise that would surround my thought could easily drown it out.

Billions of people all over the world share their thoughts electronically with everyone they know and even those they don’t. So, what separates one thought from another? Why would people spend their precious time looking at my thought versus the millions of other thoughts that are competing for their attention?

This made me focus my thoughts through a business lens. Could I create a process in which I could share specific thoughts with people that would enjoy them or gain the most from them? Could this also be something that my professional network could leverage to get their own thoughts out?

One of the most expansive and rewarding communities I participate in, is the Industry group I started earlier this year called Infrastructure Masons. It is a group of professionals who are responsible for designing, building and operating the logical and physical structures of the digital age. The engines they build drive the Internet of Everything. Literally! If you are using an electronic device attached to a network, you are leveraging the infrastructure they have deployed.

Thinking of this community has helped me narrow down what I would like to share. More importantly, I realized that iMasons could become an ideation platform for our members.

This isn’t a new approach. Like most of my peers, I have created and distributed content through many industry organizations over the years. So why reinvent the wheel? Because the old methods are painfully slow and limiting. At our first leadership summit in November of 2016, many of the members confirmed this. In previous organizations it was just too difficult to release content. First, the internal debate compounded by continuous technical, leadership and legal reviews delayed the releases by months, even years. Secondly, everyone assumed that the paper had to be perfect. The couldn’t release “ideas” or “concepts”, they had to be proven and validated before release. Finally, many groups limited what members could say due to controversial topics and potential liability that the industry group was unwilling to take on. By the time the content was published it was out of date or irrelevant. We decided to flip this on its ear.

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas – Linus Pauling

Today we are officially launching iMasons Thoughts – these are papers written by members to share ideas, concepts, challenges and contrarian views. The author(s) own the content, the opinion, and the discussion/debate that will follow. The intent of these papers is to stimulate timely dialog to help advance the industry. These papers are not meant to be static. They will be tested by leveraging community feedback to refine, change, bench or even kill the ideas. What matters is the community engagement to hone those thoughts into something useful.

Our members have unique perspectives and insight built from their extensive experience. Their ideas need to be heard. The Thoughts program is to enable timely release and iteration of their ideas.

Our first publication comes from Oz Morales, former VP of Data Centers for Amazon, and a 2nd Degree Master Level Infrastructure Mason. During his tenure, he built one of the largest and most cost effective Data Center portfolios in the world. Oz reached out to me with a proposed methodology to measure the real performance of infrastructure systems. If effective, this should give executives a simple measure of how well their infrastructure investments, and the systems that were created from them, are performing. He calls it the Engineering Operations Ratio (EOR).

IM Thought Publications – https://imasons.org/pubs/thoughts

So what do you think? My thought is that his thought could become an interesting thought for others (and you thought my puns were over). 🙂

If you would like an opportunity to publish your thoughts through Infrastructure Masons, become a member. For more information on the Thoughts process, contact thoughts@imasons.org.