How have experiences from your past roles helped to create efficiencies in your current operating model?

I have to start with one of my favorite quotes courtesy of Albert Camus - "You cannot create experience. You must undergo it."

Individual, group-based, and organizational experiences provide an important foundation for driving innovation and creating efficiencies. I have come to appreciate experiences with diverse points of view across different knowledge domains and communities of practice. Those experiences tend to enable (often in very subtle ways)  better decision making and problem solving, mostly by increasing pattern recognition and enhancing the ability to "connect the dots." 

Personal examples abound. My early experiences with mainframes informed my views on cloud computing; participating in the support roles influenced my customer first mentality; time spent in the engineering roles helped to hone my approach to problem solving, etc.

Back when I was working at a biotech company, we had to move our big server closet with about six racks of servers to Equinix because it just made more sense. The plan was to pull all the servers out, starting at 5:00PM Friday, and be done by Saturday morning. So we start ripping the cables off the back of the servers. We start unracking and throwing them in the truck. We get them to Equinix and then we're slamming them on the racks and getting everything organized. But when it came to plugging in the cables: Where the heck do I plug these things in? There's a lot of trial and error, and we didn't get it right. We were there until the next night—24 hours without any sleep. 

So at the next company I went to, it was the same situation: We had six cabinets of servers that we needed to move to Equinix. Only this time I took those blue organization boxes for cables, etc., and labeled a box for every single server. Then I had two of my systems admins sit down and spend the time to label each end of every single cable. They were like, "Why the hell are we spending two weeks doing this?" And I tried to explain to them that we were going to get this done a lot faster rather than be up for 24 hours doing this and getting frustrated." And they didn't think so.

But sure enough, we got everything in boxes, took them to Equinix, and we were able to just pull the cable out. We had a map of where each server should go, which we made before we got there. It took three hours for the movers to get everything into the room but once they were in there, we were able to complete that part in five hours.