Did you read Part 1 last week? As a reminder, the heralded photon is a single photon that is heralded by the heralding photon. You need the heralding photon to know you have the heralded photon as the heralded one is harder to detect.
Single photons are used in quantum computing. I went down that rabbit hole and now understand that they are great for encoding qubits. Qubits are to quantum computing what 0’s and 1’s are to standard computers. And they are very, very fast, tighteningly fast even.
Last week I used the heralded photon to explain how, particularly in large organisations, you need to create signal detectors to know when inputs to one project from other projects are on, or off track, rather than relying solely on the comms of other projects. As you and I know, communication is difficult to get right at the best of times.
Another lesson we can learn from the heralded photon is that sometimes we miss-detect alignment between cross-functional teams. In heralded photon systems, if your detection setup is poorly calibrated, you might get “false heralds”- thinking there’s a photon when there isn’t.
Operating in functional silos, teams can have very different interpretations of what good vs bad, fast vs slow, simple vs basic look like. Teams that come from different disciplines such as finance, marketing or engineering – for example – have their own language and sometimes one team assumes they know what the other team is saying only to find out much too late their interpretation was way off!
Last week I suggested you build detectors of key inputs from other teams to know when you will be able to reap the rewards of their work. As with the heralded photon, make sure you “calibrate” your detectors to be sure you are detecting the right messages.
Some food for thought. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
P.S. I’m celebrating the end of financial year with 15% OFF all my training throughout June. If you’ve been thinking about refreshing your skills, or your team’s, I’ve just made it a little easier so hit reply with YES and my team will make it happen 😊