Sorry if things have been a bit quiet around here, but I just returned from Costa Rica yesterday (and was very determined to not touch a keyboard while I was there).

Costa Rica’s a beautiful country (as is Nicaragua, which I was in only briefly) — full of friendly people and great food. It was a much needed vacation. I also accomplished what I was really looking forward to — getting some great pictures of monkeys in the rainforest trees. If anyone would like to see some pictures, I can post some.

So back to business. Bob Sutton has a fascinating post about how doing the obvious and mundane well is often more important than having a brilliant and original idea. Even with brilliant and original ideas, it is often the mundane (sometimes boring) execution part that allows us to succeed.

The ideas are taken from a book called Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, and they relate to how paying attention to small details in a medical setting are often the difference between success and failure.

One story that Bob relates is that battlefield doctors noticed (through careful record-keeping and analysis) that soldiers were suffering a higher-than-average degree of eye injuries. When talking to the soldiers, they discovered that the soldiers didn’t like wearing their military-issued eye protection, because, well, they felt they looked like dorks wearing it.

The military reissued the protective eyewear as cool sunglasses instead, and eye injuries went down. The obvious part of this story is that sometimes the most mundane changes can have significant effects — giving the soldiers cool sunglasses substantially reduced the amount of eye injuries they sustained.

But what else does this say to the soldier in the field? By my logic, it says two things: first that the military cares enough about your safety to maintain close measurement of injury types and to create analyses based on those findings, and second of all, that the military cares enough to actually do something to make things safer for soldiers.

Similarly, it makes sense to actively seek out information from employees about parts of their daily routine that may seem unimportant or mundane — since it is often in those ostensibly obvious tasks that the true capacity for innovation lies.