Hm, I'm not hearing from John in response to my email. Hm, Julia is surprised I don't know the information she says she emailed me yesterday.
It was subtle - and dismissible as a glitch - at first, but over more than a week, the evidence began to mount: Some emails sent to me were disappearing into thin air without bouncebacks to the senders. My technical support contractor worked hard to get to the bottom of it - but we will never know how and why a number of my regular correspondents' messages were suddenly deemed spam.
The episode made me wonder ... how often in our work do we see a small divergence from patterns and let it go as just an exception? How much evidence do we need before we see a problem? What are the thresholds by which we determine when to say "I've been noticing"?
The bottom line is vigilance. Deviations from current patterns may be legitimate alterations in organizational procedures ... but it never hurts to ask, "Hm, why?"
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