Recently I was commuting on one of the roads of Bangalore which also had a flyover wing attached to it. I was in the autorikshaw and the driver suddenly climbed the flyover, I was actually supposed to take the road and not the flyover. It took me a while to realize that I was not on the road but on the flyover. I asked the him, why did he do that and mislead me? He said, “No madam, this goes to the same place, and no tension of traffic jam”. I felt like a fool and kept my mouth shut and left him to lead.

I really felt that I was truly on the ’superhighway’ without traffic and reaching my destination probably 10-15 minutes earlier, or may be even 30 minutes, you know about traffic jams,

I could relate this incident to our day to day life. We are so unaware of the resources that we have, and simply keep doing something that we are already familiar with, rather than exploring a new way, especially in our work places. We do hit a road block, but still continue to do the same, simply because we cannot find a new way of dealing with the situation.

I came across a strange instance while I was working on a recent project of mine. We were a group of 3 people and all good team members. While at lunch, we were the perfect 3 idiots, but when it came to our project, we just failed to be on the same page at the same time. This caused us to loose a lot of time in reviews, discussing the same points again and again, and reorienting from scratch. I really thought we were the best knowledge workers around - all up to date in technology, gadget freaks and good social networking. Just could not figure out what was going wrong, until one day we sat down and thrashed it out. We realized that we did follow the best practices for project management, had the know-how, but just missed those little details which actually had the potential to give the project a new dimension or the required fillip.

Why did that happen, we felt? I thought, because we were not able to capture those thoughts or reactions of ours, which we felt were quite informal or off the records when the project was concerned. But guess what, that was the crux of the matter. Then we started sticking copious remarks on each others notepads, which we soon realized that we will end up something like this -

Soon we realized that we should start leveraging the technology that is available to us - the internet - where we have everything when we want and, isn’t a bother when we don’t. We wanted a tool which could help us collaborate quickly, give our individual inputs, while working together as a team. And guess what, we did crack it, we figured out that there’s not one but quite a few. It was truly an amazing experience, to see how we were just a few days back struggling to get things done and, the next instance, just in no time to have all information stored in one single place and even communicate in a better way.

This experience just took me back to my autorickshaw ride. The flyover ’superhighway’ was just there, but the only difference was that I had not explored it and just had a thought in my own mind(block) that it does not lead to where I want; the journey is sometimes better if we are lead.

It made me just wonder, how powerful could internet be?

Then was that the ‘information superhighway’ which was talked about in 1990s that bridged geographies, but is this, the one now, which is even real-time.