“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird Leave it to the French, to gift us a word that bridges emotional understanding with sensitivity and respect for others. “Prévenance” is one of those multi-layered, cultural subtleties, not given justice by a single synonym. A Parisian colleague and friend reminded me that some things are indeed lost in translation. We think of “empathetic, foreseeing, observant, sensitive, perceptive, caring, prescient, predictive.” But they don’t capture the essence. Prévenance is a profound awareness and anticipation of need
“I am conscious myself of a weight at my heart and a feeling of impending danger—ever present danger, which is the more terrible because I am unable to define it.” Dr. Watson, The Hound of the Baskervilles A demon canine hidden in the foggy moors seems far more foreboding than a problematic software mystery. But my decades-old recollection is one of gnawing stress, anxiety and appetite-destroying frustration. A stack overflow error in a network switch ought to be easy enough to debug, correct, and rewrite. Today it would be a nuisance gnat, swatted away and expunged as quickly as discovered. But back then, deciphering clues and unmasking poorly coded scripts seemed to no avail. Commitmen
