Back to the heart of this blog… exploring
I want to write more about exploration, and specifically, I want to talk about Geocaching. Ever heard of it? Basically it’s like a high-tech scavenger hunt using GPS (Global Positioning System) units to track down coordinates, called waypoints, where other geocachers have placed a container full of goodies. Take a goodie, leave a goodie, or just record your visit in a log available in the container or on the website, www.geocaching.com. Heh. I just revisited the site after a long time away and I especially like their new tagline “The sport where You are the search engine.” Perfect.
My foray into geocaching has been a lot of fun in the Austin, Texas area where the geeky technology and rugged outdoor appreciation quotients are both high, making for some fun, creative, techie geocaching. My first attempt to find a cache was along a greenbelt near some high-tech office spaces. The title of the cache was “Death of a Dot-Com.” I searched and searched but finally had to go back to the website for a tip or cheat. It’s tough to find plastic containers partially hidden on a rocky hillside. My second visit and sweep of the area yielded the cache, including SWAG (Stuff We All Get) from a failed Austin dot-com, and I recorded my visit. Success! And I learned how to seek better while exploring.
Geocaching has evolved over the years. You can now put “travel bugs” in a geocache and have the next explorer take that travel bug with them and place it in another cache. The tracking of a travelling object offers another dimension to geocaching. In this tracking there is a nugget of an idea for our route to value message, such as taking a concept from one route and lending it to another route.
Another concept that has evolved from geocaching is the idea of finding benchmarks, which are US survey data points across the entire United States. I’m sure that benchmarking is very useful when implementing BSM, and sharing your benchmarks with other teams or other companies is a great way to build best practices.
Geocaching compared to Business Service Management might be a stretch, but I think there are exploration concepts that we can discuss here. Got any geocaching tales to tell?