Bulletin 2 December 2022. The System Is the System, whether we like it or not
Sir Galahad: Camelot!
Sir Lancelot: Camelot!
Patsy: It’s only a model.
Working in technology has an addling effect on the brain. Despite decades of trying to ignore the Kool-Aid, its residue has still established itself a beachhead in my mind, has created just a little furring in the pipelines of my thinking. Even as I look at the world, see its continued stumble forward into what I hope is a more enabled, empowered future, I want to believe the visions of a better place I receive on an almost daily basis. Everything will be better, cheaper, greener, I’m told – and while I know it isn’t simple as that, I want to believe the superfice, to take the bold statements on face value. I really do.
The problem isn’t that it is all made up; more, the challenge is how to tease what can be achieved, from what is being presented. Don’t get me wrong – I know we need a vision. As humans, we’re only likely to respond if we are excited enough to buy into what’s being presented.
We also love a charismatic speaker, who can make everything sound possible. I know I do – I still remember buying three bottles of some cleaning product from a man outside a hypermarket in Paris, just because he was so good at telling me how good the product was. The punchline isn’t even whether it worked, when I got it home; it’s that I never found out, because in all the excitement, I’d temporarily forgotten that I rarely clean my car. The three bottles sat on a shelf in the garage for at least a decade before they were disposed of. No, I’m not proud of this.
In business, it’s a challenge, isn’t it? Every organisation needs a vision, needs leadership, needs all the oompf it takes to make its employees want to get up in the morning. And similarly, the tech industry thrives on cranial energy, generating its own cryptocurrency by way of synaptic power. Without excitement, there would be no industry – and therefore no innovation, no breakthroughs, no digital transformation (there’s the K-A kicking in). I’ve written before about annealing, in which metal amalgams are heated so that they flow together, before cooling to form a hardened alloy – this is simulated annealing of the senses, just without the cooling.
The challenge is when it – the vision – doesn’t actually map onto an achievable reality. I remember one person I used to work for, who did a pretty good job of painting a picture of what the future was going to look like. “Trouble is, he’s started believing his own bullshit,” said a colleague. True or not, that’s the danger – if our own thinking (singular or corporate marketing) jumps some figurative shark, then we arrive in a nether-nether wasteland of unachievable goals.
Hyperbolic statements about the future are one thing, but similarly imaginary realities about the present are quite something else. We can all be skewed by our own perspective and experience (to the extent that we can believe everything is fine just because we are). Denial is a dangerous thing, and denial of reality is doubly so.
Some of this boils down to straightforward systems thinking. I’m not greatly experienced in this area so bear with me, but one thing I have learned is that it is a question of scope. If you look at manufacturing plant, for example, it takes in trailer loads of stuff at one end, and similar trailers line up at the other to take away its mass-produced outputs. You may have a great idea that it could be doing something completely different, but it won’t, any more than a car could double as a parachute.
And so it is in business, which takes in whatever it likes – widgets or liquids, ideas and concepts – and outputs something people will want to pay for. Organisations today are tussling with how to deliver on the promise of the technological age: they’ve been told that digital transformation implies some wholesale change in business models, a starting from scratch, a reinvention. I’m completely up for it, sounds great – but for two things. The first is that every single new organisation I have seen, as it scales, creates similar structures and has similar cultural/political elements as every other, past or present.
This is debatable. We have flatter structures, matrices, self-managed clusters and so on. But they all still have meetings, silos, career ladders, inter-departmental politics and the rest. No magical structure exists which somehow misses out our human traits, habits and foibles.
The second issue, a corollary of the first, is that making any change will inevitably hit a wall of, potentially insurmountable resistance. You can do what some are currently trying, which is to remove half the staff and keep your fingers crossed that you still have a business at the end of it. Or you can work through the well-founded principles of change management and make the adjustments that are actually feasible, and palatable for your organisation.
The digital transformation mantra may well have been “transform or die,” citing Kodak, Blockbuster and the like; but there’s even greater potential for “transform and die” – it’s funny how the tech industry chooses to ignore the demise of its own business empires (Yahoo! And Myspace, anyone?) even as it keeps telling other industries how they need to get with the program.
What’s the answer? I hate to get dull about this, but it reminds me of my days as a business analyst, where we followed a pretty boring, three-step methodology (even the word makes me want to yawn) when it came to business change. First, understand the as-is situation; then, define a to-be situation; then put together a plan for getting from one to the other. Insert “low-hanging fruit” and “stakeholder buy-in” and you’re pretty much done.
So, yes, to as-is and to-be. The point here is that, unless you’re going to take a leap into the unknown, you need to know what you have, before you decide how to change it. The art of the possible has to accept reality as it stands, working with the existing system rather than creating a new one (nota bene, the latter option exists: it’s called setting up a company).
To finish on a piece of good news, even such an approach requires vision, leadership and indeed, charisma to deliver. There’s plenty of milage to be gained from adopting technology in new and exciting ways, without feeling obliged to replace the farm with a casino in the sky. In fact, in the longer term, perhaps more so.
Apropos of vision vs reality, here’s an article I wrote this week about the “Journey to the Cloud” mantra costing organisations money, as it skews their technology strategies and causes them to spend more than they should, whilst achieving less benefit than they hope. I proffer “multi-platform architecture” as one way of thinking different. Here’s my post on LinkedIn about it, I’d welcome any thoughts you have (there or here!)
Thanks for reading,
Jon