A long time ago, back in my younger years, I joined my high school’s rowing team. Then I rowed in college. And because apparently, I hadn’t had enough of getting up at an ungodly hour to voluntarily make my body hurt, I even rowed on a club team after I moved to Chicago. 

So, you can imagine how excited I was when I heard Netflix was coming out with a new show about rowing called “Crew Girl”. 

My friend from college equally excited. She was the coxswain, the person who steers the boat and spends a lot of time yelling at everyone in and out of the boat, for our college men’s team. 

Naturally, we planned a watch party. It didn’t matter that she lived in Detroit and I live in Chicago. We just synchronized our Netflix accounts and agreed to start watching at exactly the same time on the day Crew Girl was released. 

It was going to be perfect. Popcorn was ready. 

Except, it wasn’t.
To say we were disappointed would be an understatement. 

From our perspective, the writers and directors clearly had not done their homework. 
“Coxie”?! What is a coxie?! 
Rowers can’t just switch from port to starboard like that! 
A co-ed school with only a men’s rowing team? Highly unlikely. 
That is not what coxswains say in the boat! 

Every five minutes we would say, “Did you SEE that?” 

We watched a few episodes, but eventually we just couldn’t enjoy it. We knew too much about rowing. Our brains could only focus on picking apart the technical details. 

Meanwhile… 

Our teenage daughters LOVED the show. They didn’t care that the stroke rates were way too slow for a race or that the rowers had terrible technique. We decided to watch it with them through their eyes. They talked about their favorite episodes, the girl power of the main character, and the tough story lines. 

Apparently, a LOT of other people thought the same thing because Crew Girl has already been picked up for a second season. 

What did we miss?

We didn’t miss the mistakes. 

We missed the point.

We were evaluating the show based on how accurately it portrayed rowing. Our daughters were evaluating it based on whether it was entertaining. 

And that distinction got me thinking about something I see in operations all the time. 

Sometimes, knowing the work too well makes it harder to see the point. 

That happens in operations more than we’d like to admit.  

I see it when the same people have been doing the same work for years. They develop an incredible amount of institutional knowledge. They know the workarounds. They know which spreadsheet to use. They know who to call when something goes sideways. They know that Step 4 technically says one thing, but everyone actually does something else. 

Don’t get me wrong, that knowledge is valuable. 

It can also be a breeding ground for chronic frustration. This leads to the potential for missed opportunities to make processes less costly and reduce risk. 

That’s where bringing in someone who isn’t immersed in the siloed day-to-day work can be incredibly powerful. Fresh eyes notice things that familiarity makes invisible. 

They ask the questions everyone else stopped asking. 
Why does this step exist? 
Is there an automated way to do this? 
Why are three people involved in approving this? 
How does this support the final product? 

 They aren’t attached to the history. 
Internal teams often know exactly why something was done a certain way five years ago but don’t ask if that risk has since been eliminated.  
Maybe the risk that prompted the extra approval was eliminated. 
Maybe the system changed. 
Maybe the volume of work changed. 
They separate the reason something was created from the reason it still exists.
 
They can see the friction that handoffs create. 
More handoffs mean more risk and hidden manual workarounds. 
They notice that one person has to remember to do something because the system doesn’t. 
They recognize when there is an opportunity to cut out a middleman. 
They can challenge something without making it personal. 

They can connect the process back to the outcome.  
This doesn’t mean you need to be ready for someone to come in and blow up your entire process. 

External support sits alongside the team and gets to know their work. 
Leaders AND teams need to be open to new ideas and ways of working. 
Everyone must understand that change takes time. It’s not easy. 

My friend and I know rowing. We know enough about it to spot every flaw in Crew Girl. Our daughters don’t. Yet they were able to enjoy the show because they had a different perspective. 

When you’ve been staring at the same process, system, problem or team for long enough, you may not need another person who knows the business. 

I work with leadership teams that have been rowing in the same boat line-up for too long. They need help to figure out what is getting in the way of execution, so they stop wasting precious time and money.

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Keep turning that chaos into progress, 
 
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