The rearview mirror, the sonar and the periscope

Our founder Steve Dept (he/him/his) wrote a short piece to reflect on last year and plot out cApStAn’s course for this year. It begins like this:

There is no shortage of C-Suite executives and founders who prompt generative AI to provide an optimistic outlook of the coming year. For as far as I can remember, it has been a widespread practice to look into the proverbial crystal ball and come up with musings about the year to come. This exercise is typically associated with humble bragging (a frequent oxymoron) about achievements. Do I have to indulge in that? We certainly did spend some time during the year both extolling the use of the AI toolkit for narrow use cases and heeding the risks that come with undiscerning use of large language models. Using such tools to reflect on the past year or to play futurist seems really off.

So, is it anachronic to use a plain rearview mirror for hindsight, an old-fashioned sonar to sound depth, and a periscope to make out what lies ahead? Of course it isn’t. All these tools continue to be widely used in the age of AI, and they do the job for which they were designed.

What do I see when I resort to these artefacts?

Notwithstanding a few black spots, the rearview mirror tells me that our de facto diversity (our core team of 21?permanent and 7?flexible members features 19?nationalities) works miracles. cApStAn’s project managers, translation technologists, business developers collectively understand the stakes and master the required skills. In a project such as the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), in which our team ensures linguistic quality assurance of 116 versions of test instruments and questionnaires, in 55?languages and for 94?countries, cohesion, coordination, reactivity and complicity are must-haves. Check. We have them. There were several successive waves of technical challenges, and we saved the day, in close collaboration with our consortium partners. I note that this mammoth project accounted for about one quarter of our work in 2024.

It was great to come together in The Hague for a two-day company-wide event that most of us could attend. Our “excellence among friends” ethos prevails.

The sonar helps me probe the depth of the achievements.

Finaly, the periscope: as cApStAn enters its 25th year, we are all aware that resting on our laurels could be fatal. Having consolidated our technology team, we have designed and tested new workflows, leveraged new tools and customised existing ones, and we went into deep water: our case studies are set in the production environment, and we can replicate and scale them.