I have a cat. She’s named Darwin, and she’s pretty awesome.

Let me tell you something about this cat. She is absolutely spoiled. I don’t have kids. If you have kids, imagine how much more money you would have if you didn’t have kids. Okay, so take one percent of that money and imagine you’re spending it on a cat. That’s how spoiled this cat is.

She’s basically got everything. She’s got one of those ridiculous multi-level cat condos. Her litter box is a robot. She gets the best food money can buy. She gets veterinary visits regularly, whether she wants them or not (and let me clear this up for you: she does not).

So, cat toys. I’m actually here to talk about something else. But I’m starting with cat toys.

As you can probably imagine, she has cat toys. All kinds of cat toys. There are two big boxes in the living room filled with cat toys. There are cloth fish, with catnip within. There is a stuffed frog that makes frog noises. There’s a stuffed bird that makes bird noises. There are a bunch of different kinds of balls. Tennis balls, super balls, whatever.

She likes these toys! But the one she likes best is called stick.

If you were to guess that it involves a stick, you would be correct. It’s a long plastic stick. On one side, there’s a handle. On the other is a piece of string, and at the end of the piece of string is a bunch of crinkly plastic tentacles.

Darwin loves stick.

There’s a big difference between the rest of her toys and stick. I have to operate the stick. Whip it around, let her chase the crinkly bits until she catches them. Wait until she gives it up. Start all over again. If it were up to Darwin, she’d have me give up my career, friendships and the need to eat food so I could play stick full-time. It would probably be more than full-time. I think she would enforce mandatory overtime.

When she wants to play stick, she sits in the middle of the living room with her paws tucked in and meows. Most of the time.

Sometimes she doesn’t meow, and I don’t realize what she wants until I walk through the living room and get a look that seems to say that she’s very disappointed that I have not anticipated her needs.

But this is about STARFLEET and engagement.

People are not cats. But sometimes they have interests and we don’t know about them because they’re not talking to us about them. They’re not meowing. They’re sitting in the living room waiting patiently. And STARFLEET may be giving them a lot of toys. They may enjoy those toys. But maybe they’d love to play the equivalent of stick. We may not know how to play stick.

It is also entirely possible that we have no idea what a stick is, because it’s something that we’ve never really considered.

And it is also entirely possible that many, many cats would love to play stick.

Part of the reason it’s important to break things down into small pieces and implement new things quickly is so that we can put something in front of STARFLEET members and find out if it’s their stick. It might not be their stick, and that’s totally fine. We’ll move on to the next thing, then the next thing, then the next thing.

Try something. If it doesn’t work, let it fail. Learn why it failed. Try something else, and maybe it’ll do better because you learned something new last time. Maybe it won’t. Keep trying. Resist the urge to create a department or a fancy position in the name of something you’re trying — If no one wants it, it’s a tremendous waste of precious resources. Keep learning.

I would write more about this but I’m hearing noises from the living room. I might be a while.