What is Going on with Masonic Ponderances?

It's been a while.

Photo by Mahdi Bafande on Unsplash

My life in general has been upside down for the past six-months with notable and consequential changes occurring in my career and on the Masonic/social fronts.

There is so much that I want to say about these things.

Careerwise: Yes, I am still employed at the same public utility district (PUD).
This past summer, I was blindsided by a decision made by the executive leadership team to eliminate my position as the Corrective Action Program (CAP) Manager. To do so, they caused the CAP team and program to be assimilated by the Continuous Improvement team. I now report to a person who has not been in the work force for as long as I have been a people leader.

To make matters worse, my new manager has no inkling as to what a CAP even is. For all they know it’s a fancy hat. I learned of this when, at our first meeting, my new supervisor, with all the youthful exuberance of their age, told me they had lots of innovative ideas to improve this process. Shortly after this statement, when pressed, they admitted that they did not have any idea as to what my team does. Great start!

This decision was a tremendous blow to me which was made worse by the fact that I architected, nurtured, and fretted over all the details of this new program whose roots are in the highly regulated commercial nuclear power generation industry. My knowledge of nuclear CAP is the very reason the GM/CEO of Grant PUD recruited me.
The key to the success of this program was our ability to recognize and adapt to change rapidly. This was not a “cookie-cutter” effort. Should I have considered it so and simply implemented a nuclear style, Corrective Action Program, this country PUD would not have been able to derive any value from such a decision, as the rigor of such a program would bog down the daily operations to a most inefficient crawl. The challenge was to introduce the parts of such a process that would yield the best results without smothering the organization in a clumsy process. As we were doing this, my vision of what we needed to do to make a program such as this viable had to materialize by creating some important infrastructure which will be necessary to capture and track these performance events and the corrective actions to ensure they were completed appropriately. This was something which did not exist prior to my tenure at the PUD.

As this was taking shape, I was hiring staff, bringing them up to speed and helping them to become respectable cause analysts. Did I mention that we had to train the rest of the PUD to our process while managing the change associated with our new program to overcome all the pockets of resistance? This was a very wordy to say I am immensely proud of what we accomplished and extremely invested in its success. The conversation where I learned that I would have to let my baby fly from the nest was devastating and felt like an insurmountable loss. I was assured this was a business decision and not a result of a performance issue.
I took me quite some time to come to acceptance. The first milestone for me was when I was able to let go of the results of the decisions of which I have no control. This program isn’t mine I was the caretaker. The next big one was that this program we built was able to stand on its own and engrained in the organization’s business processes!
I still do not like the way this was handled, and I have decisions to be made around these circumstances. My final realization is that a number of those who worked with me do not want me to leave and have expressed their appreciation in many ways.
What prompted me to get off the X and author this part of the article was the process of having to update my resume to reflect my new title. Check it out: Robert Lougee

Speaking of my Masonic journey- As I hinted at, there is not much that I will say at this point other than regardless of what happens, my impression of Masonry has been permanently altered. Without getting specific, I will borrow a term from the rocket people when describing a catastrophic failure. They refer to this failure as a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”. In my case not as rapid, but rapid enough.
This about sums it up. These months have seen former friends jettisoned by my hand and others reject me.

There is so much that I will talk about when to do so will not make this unfortunate situation any more complex. When I do speak about this it will be in the same transparent and unadulterated fashion in which I always do.

The massive lesson to me is no matter how bad it seems, there is always a bright side, if you choose to focus on it. The overarching feelings I have are a result of discovering that without these events, I would not feel the liberating feelings (to quote an epic source of many memes) “by being unburdened by what has been”.

There is a post from the author of another Substack - Emeth whose brief note today lit this fire under me to write, even though I cannot tell the whole story of either of these events, because neither circumstance has come to a stopping point yet.