POInT Program for Information Technology

The Parable of the Insightful Twin

2010-12-19T07:11:00.001-08:00

Once upon a time, hoping that they might learn about colors by playing with them, the parents of young twins gave each a coloring book, “My Day at the Zoo,” and a big box of crayons. Working separately for many hours, the twins eagerly decorated the many black-outlined animal drawings in their books.

The Operator

At the end of the day, the first twin, beaming with pride, returned her finished book to her parents. She had colored the elephants a precise elephant gray, the horses in various shades of horse-brown, and the birds in many different and very bird-appropriate pastel hues. She had colored every animal picture in her book with obvious care, accurately, smoothly, and consistently, exactly within and never outside of its printed borders.

“What color is this?” the parents asked while pointing to the perfectly colored picture of a canary perched on the branch of a tree. The first twin proudly announced “Yellow!”

“And this?” the parents asked, pointing to the tree’s branch. “Brown!” she replied. “And this?” they asked of the leaves on the branch. “Green!” said the child with a broad grin.

To her parents’ delight, the first twin knew the proper names of every color in the crayon box, too, and even the exotic shades, like periwinkle and cerulean blue. She generalized what she had learned that day as well, correctly identifying the color of the kitchen’s new drapes as carnation pink and Dad’s necktie as puce. Her parents were very happy. As they had hoped she would, she had learned all about colors.

The Conceptualizer

A while later, the second twin returned with a scribbled-on book full of absurdly colored pictures of bright red lions and deep blue turtles. His baffled parents looked blankly at each other.

“What’s this?” asked his parents tentatively, pointing to a purple dog. “Cool huh?” replied the second twin. “I got that color by mixing the red crayon with the blue one.”

“And this?” asked the parents, pointing to an orange giraffe. “That’s the color you get when you mix the red one and the yellow one,” he replied.

Perplexed, his parents fell silent. Sensing their confusion, the second twin explained, “There are lots of colors in the crayon box, but, here, see?” Using the blue and yellow crayons, he scribbled a few lines across a picture of a cow. “See?” he said again, pointing to the color he had just made. “You can make every different color in the whole box by mixing different amounts of just a few basic colors.” In response to another long, silent stare from his parents, he prompted “See? I made green! Isn’t that cool?”

But all his disappointed parents could see was a sloppily colored green cow. “Uh huh… that’s… cool...” they muttered through thin smiles, as they silently pondered enrolling him in a Special School.

Encouraging Forests to Hide Among Their Trees

As we travel along our separate paths to professional enlightenment, our journeys’ peripheral details tend to distract and even divert us. Not surprising, as, after all, aren’t we taught from childhood that great recognition and material reward bloom from the carefully cultivated seeds of knowing the littlest details? A young child, like our first twin, praised by her parents for having just learned and recited the names of the colors of all the crayons in the box, naturally sets about discovering and memorizing the names of all the other colors in her world, too. Eventually, after years of being praised for committing shade after shade to memory, the child, now all grown up, can “ace” a standardized test consisting of multiple-choice name-the-color questions, perhaps to be officially declared a Certified Color Expert (CCE). More recognition, promotion, and material reward ensue, all further proving the value of mastering even the tiniest details.

Yet, aren’t the roots of a deep awareness of the human experience of color, which had begun to sprout within the second twin, in the enlightened observation that each can be formed by mixing different amounts of the primary colors of red, green, and blue? Burnt umber’s Red/Green/Blue coordinates, for example, are 138, 51, and 36. Likewise, every hue can be expressed as numeric coordinates along these three basic dimensions, and even more profound truths underlie this knowledge, in the physiology of the human eye, and in the physics of light. Perched on the verge of these revelations, with a little encouragement, perhaps the second twin would uncover the few basic laws that govern all these many details? Will his parents find the wisdom to “color” him outside the lines of their own expectations and encourage his quest? Will he brave disappointing his parents and harness the power of his own curiosity to urge himself along in his unorthodox, but more deeply true, pursuit of understanding?

Details, we must master them, but the truth calls us from beyond them. It waits, masked, behind them. To reveal it, we must risk a deeper way of thinking. And more than merely tolerate it, we must actively encourage such thinking in others.

Questions

We respect and reward professionals who “cross their T’s and dot their I’s,” but why settle for mastering less than 10% of the alphabet?
We express reverence for competency. We reward it publicly. We talk endlessly of “Core Competencies” and “Competency Models” as we build our “Centers of Excellence.” But, is competency a noble enough human goal? When is competency a trap?
As a leader, are you annoyed by people who rewrite plans, waste time on research, and meander through ideas that have nothing to do with what you expect of them? What do you risk losing when you express this annoyance?

_______________________________

Leaders with the courage to scatter seeds of creative freedom can reap a harvest of game-changing discovery. The POInT Program can help cultivate the field.

Learn more, contribute, or just follow:

The Parable of the Christmas Lights

2010-12-05T12:11:00.001-08:00

A Holiday Allegory for Information Technology

Growing up, as I recall, the otherwise festive Christmas holiday season held forth the dreadful prospect of wrestling with a box full of Christmas tree lights.

Ignoring the fact that it’s cheaper and easier to replace them each year, perhaps as a matter of honor and tradition, it had become my family’s policy that no new tree lights would be purchased until every attempt had been made to untangle and revive the old ones.

In keeping this tradition, I found myself in the same familiar mess every year as I set out to decorate our house with lights. No matter how carefully I may have coiled and packed them away at the end of the previous year, the many separate strands of lights seemed somehow to have found each other during the off-season and hopelessly entangled themselves. This made me angry, as though they’d deliberately, even spitefully, knotted themselves into a perplexing mass of bulbs, plugs, sockets, and wires.

So, as punishment every year, I dealt with them the same traditional way. I shook them vigorously, hoping somehow that the individual strings of lights would repent and separate themselves from each other. When they didn’t, I dived aggressively into the middle of the knot, pulled at it from within, stretched it, embraced its confusion and became a part of it. Eventually, one by one, each string of Christmas lights would somehow drop away from the others, until, at last, mission accomplished! But the achievement was always more by accident than design, and never without my fair share of pain.

Still, primates being what they are, even the tiniest and rarest success will strongly reinforce habitual behavior, the bad habits as well as the good. As I looked with pride at the untangled lights, each individual strand now laying on the floor vanquished and submissive (a few literally broken as well), next year’s application of the mindless “shake and hope” method, notwithstanding its obvious stupidity, had been assured.

Breaking with tradition is never comfortable, but, one year, for a change, I deliberately calmed myself down and thought about the problem first. I reasoned that, in years past, I had concentrated too hard on the problem’s most obvious in-your-face aspect, that infuriating knot of bulbs and wire. In anger, I had traditionally attacked it, literally, from the inside. This may have felt good, but it got me nowhere. After a lot of shaking and complaining, the problem eventually solved itself, but the solution always took longer, and broke a lot more light bulbs, than it needed to. Looking back, my “tradition” was really just the bad habit of injecting energy blindly into a confused situation, hoping for the best. Eventually, when a solution finally presented itself, it was only at random. A paint shaker could have done as well.

That year, a little deliberation made all the difference. Knots, I reasoned, are best untied from the outside, by first finding the parts of each string that aren’t in the knot, the ends, the terminal sockets and plugs of each separate strand. One by one, I found and threaded the ends out of the knot. Gradually, the un-knotted ends became longer and longer, as the knot ─ my problem ─ became smaller and smaller, until, eventually, it was gone.

It was tedious and a little boring pulling those ends out of the knot one at a time. Emotionally, this new approach was less satisfying than shaking and tugging at the knot until it finally learned its lesson and fell loose. Still, for achieving predictable results economically, the systematic start-with-the-ends approach beat my traditional flailing-away-at-the knot method hands-down.

Questions

Where does an IT communication network “begin?” Where does it “end?”
How can an IT specialist’s narrow technical point of view cause her to get lost in the “knot?”
Privately inventory some of your bad thinking habits. What are you doing to break them? Or, do they feel so good to you that you'd rather not?
When addressing technical issues, counterproductive emotions like anger and pride can feel like reasonable behavior. Why is this? How can we overcome it? How can organizational leadership help?

_______________________

The POInT Organizational Transformation Program helps diagnose and correct the cognitive biases that can prevent IT professionals and teams from finding and solving the root causes of technical problems. Work smart. Learn more at:
http://point-cmc.blogspot.com.
And, Happy Holidays!

The Parable of the Beach

2010-10-29T08:37:00.001-07:00

I remember playing outside my home one bright summer morning, a very young child surrounded by all of my happy little friends, when my parents approached me with a proposition.

“We’re going to the Beach today!” they pronounced through broad smiles.

I was only five years old, had no idea what “the Beach” was, and, besides, I was having a grand time with my friends in our yard. So, I politely passed on the opportunity and kept playing.

That’s when my parents pulled out their PowerPoint slides and started their pitch.

The Beach

Water!

As far as the eye can see
You can walk or swim in it
You’ll be completely safe

We’ll hold your hand
We won’t let go

Sand!

As much as you want
You can dig holes in it as deep as you like
We’ll even let you bury us in it

Candy and Ice Cream!
Amusement Rides!

OK, ok. I still wasn’t sure why, but I was sold. I sent my friends home, climbed into the car with my parents, and off we went.

And went, and went, and went. As we drove, my five-year-old brain struggled with the idea of being stuck for so long in the car. Hours! When you’re only five years old, a couple of hours is a very significant percentage of your life to date.

Looking ahead through the windshield, straining to see as far up the road as I could, I tried to spot this Beach I’d been sold. I’d see a house in the dim distance, or a tall tree, and, being a child ignorant of things like the horizon and the curvature of the earth, I’d figure, surely, that house or tree way up ahead along the road must be the Beach.

A few minutes later, though, we’d motor right past that house or tree and keep driving, so I’d ask, “Are we there yet?”

At first, my parents would smile and explain that the Beach was farther away, but that we’d be there soon.

So, I looked ahead again as far as I could see, and spotted a telephone pole, or an office building, and figured, “well, then that thing surely must be the Beach.” But we’d drive past it a few minutes later, I’d ask again if we were there yet, and my parents would repeat, through thinner smiles this time, that the beach was farther away and we’d be there soon.

Our collective patience waned pretty quickly as I asked over and over, until finally they ordered me to stop asking, suggested I take a nap, and told me they’d wake me up when we got there. I wasn’t one bit happy about it, but I got the point and fidgeted myself to sleep.

Eventually, of course, we made it to the Beach, which was very hot, and very crowded, with impossibly long lines of sunburned tourists trailing up to every amusement ride. Yes, there was plenty of water, but it was dirty and rough and full of strange people and very, very cold. And, as promised, there was plenty of sand everywhere, including in my ice cream, on my candy, and especially in my bathing suit and sneakers.

We packed up after a few hours and headed silently back home in our car, and I put the whole miserable experience out of my mind, until I began work as an IT consultant.

Information Technology often feels like my childhood trip to the Beach. Various vendors and consultants sell us, as IT professionals, on their particularly wonderful destination products and services, each offering a marvelous future wherein everything works and everyone’s happy: “the Beach!” And, off we go.

Along the way, we spy up ahead the oncoming virtual future of promised technology – Cloud Computing, Virtualization, SOAP, Open Source, whatever – and, like children, we naturally confuse each with the Beach. These milestones come and go, though, and, as our real future unfolds, it seems to offer new experiences of the same old frustrations. Things still don’t work perfectly, and our users still aren’t totally happy. The “Beaches” we buy never quite materialize, and our ride just seems to go on and on.

We work in a profession that reveres closure, one that pressures us to provide decisive technical answers quickly. How can we possibly find peace in the inevitable conclusion that Information Technology has no destination?

Information Technology, like everything else in our human experience of life, is all about the ride. As we drive along, past one imperfect technical solution after another, the key to getting along with everyone else in this car we share lies in our individual search for honest answers to three basic human questions:

Who am I?
Who are you? And, how can I help you?
What practical situations are we facing right now? And, how can I work with you to deal with them?

Awareness is the key to long-term success in Information Technology: awareness of self, of the others who surround us, and of the endless passage of practical situations in which we, as IT professionals, find ourselves. Finding the freedom to answer these questions for ourselves, then setting others free and helping them to do the same, are all a part of growing up along our way.

_______________________

The POInT Organizational Transformation Program smooths the journey for IT professionals and organizations, and Al Cini is the POInT Program’s tour guide. Learn more at:
http://point-cmc.blogspot.com.

Hey, Way to Micromanage!

2010-06-20T07:15:00.001-07:00

If you’re getting second-hand reports (they’ll rarely tell you to your face) that the people in your organization have been complaining about your micromanaging ways, maybe it’s because you’re doing it wrong?

This instructional video might help:

Is Micromanagement Ever a Good Thing?

Is there a proper way to micromanage (or nanomanage, or picomanage…) IT people? Or, is all micromanagement just plain bad management?

As with most of the people-oriented mistakes that people make, the answer lies in the unconscious intentions that misguide our behavior.

Bad Intention #1: Ego Defense. “I was the best there ever was, I’m the best there is, and I’m going to make sure that everyone knows I’m the best there ever will be.”

Before you became a manager, you were technical, and, if you do say so yourself, you were darn good at it. You really miss those daily opportunities to prove yourself, by coding rings around everyone else on your team, by amazing end-users with your uniquely excellent tech support skills, or by being the first to adopt the latest and coolest product releases to design, install and configure your organization’s IT infrastructure.

So, as a manager, you compensate by competing with your subordinates, by repeatedly teaching them the one and only right way to do their jobs: your way.

Bad Intention #2: Managing Up by Micromanaging Down. “To climb my way up within my Company, I need to be seen doing things the Company Way.”

Your company’s developed or adopted some methodology to help ensure that the highest-quality technical work will be done on time and within budget. As a middle manager who’s on the move, you want to be perceived as ready, willing, and anxious to do whatever it takes to please upper management.

So, you breathe, eat, and sleep every detail of your company’s mandated quality and productivity programs. You make sure everyone under you does, too, by regularly comparing their work with your company’s published methodology templates. When you find employees who aren’t doing things right, you criticize them as loudly and publicly as possible – not just to correct their unprofessional behavior, but to maintain and strengthen the widely held impression that you’re the ultimate professional “company guy.”

Bad Intention #3: The Boss Knows Best. “I’m the boss, which makes me responsible for everything my people do. And, as Spider-man’s Dad said: ‘with great responsibility comes great authority.’ (umm, no, wait…)”

When your people fail, you fail. And, left to their own devices, people will always fail, won’t they? Well, in your organization, failure is not an option.

So, you map within your mind every task and sub-task of every technical project for which your team is responsible, and, at the many team meetings you call for this purpose, you require that everyone review their progress on an intricately detailed task-by-task basis. This exposes, before one and all, the slackers and malingerers, and makes clear that, in your organization, such behavior will never be overlooked or tolerated.

Micromanagement: Be honest. How’s it workin’ for ya?

As one of the hallmarks of the authoritarian personality, micromanagement can trigger the kind of passive-aggressive organizational behavior that stalls collective effort and inhibits collaborative progress. That’s a pretty steep downside risk for a technique that, on its face, seems to promise the upside of a job well done.

Is All Micromanagement Bad?

On the other hand, people sometimes lose sight of the goals their organization sets for them. Talented and experienced technicians can sit, utterly disengaged, in a state of professional torpor, for days or weeks on end, unable on their own to find their way back to productivity. If ignored for long, this malaise can spread, infecting others in the organization.

Foundering employees need to be identified quickly. In a calm and organized way, perhaps with help from HR, they need to be confronted (privately), and either helped or reassigned. Reminding them of the goals of the organization they serve, and reacquainting them with the details of their jobs, can help get their efforts back on track. In this context, while it can – and should -- feel uncomfortable to the manager who has to do it, micromanagement is good management.

Is micromanagement bad or good? Perhaps that’s the best test: Effective micromanagement should always feel uncomfortable. When micromanagement feels good, it’s self-serving rather than others-serving behavior, and self-serving micromanagement is always bad.

Questions

For managers: when has micromanagement worked for you? (Extra credit: can you admit that you do it? Can you explain how it’s hurt you?)
For recovering micromanagers: tell us how you overcame your compulsion to micromanage?
For everyone: have you ever needed micromanaging in your job? Was the situation handled well by your manager?

The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

2010-06-08T11:29:00.000-07:00

In Information Technology, it seems you can’t buy employee commitment.

In fact, when it comes to encouraging people to work cognitively, on brainpower tasks that require creativity or abstract thinking, cash is more of a de-motivator than a motivator.

Don’t believe me? Take ten minutes to watch this surprising video.

“Bottom line: If we treat people like people, instead of like horses…”

The conventional wisdom is that you “pay for performance.” The truth is, well, something else altogether. Instead of inspiring quality effort, extrinsic monetary rewards actually discourage high-quality work.

So much for extrinsic motivators. To learn about a very effective system of intrinsic motivators, click here, then come back and answer these questions.

Questions:

Leaders/Managers: On your team or project, or within your organization, which extrinsic incentives (e.g., money) have you used to motivate people? Which have worked? Which haven’t?
Everyone: Which intrinsic motivators best inspire you in your professional pursuits? Do you work within an organizational culture that understands and respects this? If so, how is this expressed in that culture? If not, what do you think management can/should do to correct it?

Measuring ≠ Accomplishing

2010-06-01T06:17:00.001-07:00

t+0: Helpdesk Support Ticket opened

t+5 seconds: Helpdesk Support Ticket closed

t+forevermore: User Totally Frustrated

Notes:

Both people feel they’re doing what their company wants them to do.
Neither is listening to the other.
The user's problem isn't resolved.
Yet, according to the helpdesk ticket’s statistics, "Mission Accomplished."

How is this possible?

Thoroughly researched over many years by countless organizational and social psychologists, cognitive dissonance enables people to perceive failure as success. Ironically, the systems IT organizations use to measure success can be “gamed” to provide cover for such misperception.

Questions:

Do you believe that the metrics you use to manage your people capture the acts of service they perform?
How do you follow up on your systems of measurement to ensure that they do?

Dumb Like Einstein, and Another Important Heresy

2010-01-11T13:19:00.001-08:00

“God doesn’t play dice with the Universe.” Thus tweeted the Great Albert Einstein in 1926. And, ever since, folks everywhere have been retweeting this profound revelation about God, straight from the Gospel According to Albert.

Problem is, Einstein didn’t exactly say that. Here’s what the man actually wrote, in a letter to pioneering quantum physicist Max Born:

“Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the 'old one'. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.”

Albert’s Intellectual Limitations

Turns out Einstein, the man who by 1926 had earned copious major honors by revealing the architecture of the Universe at Large, wasn’t really referring to God in his letter at all. The Great Genius was, in fact, confessing his own difficulty in grasping the basic architecture of the Quantum Universe of the Very Small. Biased, perhaps, by his subjective familiarity with a personal Almighty, Albert’s “inner voice” had misinformed his objective understanding of the nature of reality’s littlest things.

Einstein strongly (stubbornly?) believed that randomness in scientific observations resulted from human imperfection in observing and understanding. Make perfect the instruments and sharpen and deepen the theory, he figured, and, poof! like a god, you know everything, and can therefore predict the cosmically enormous set of all possible future events, even the very tiniest ones, with 100% certainty.

This Determinist Einstein just couldn’t accept what his contemporary particle physicists were demonstrating over and over again in their labs. Where certain behaviors of really little things like electrons and photons are concerned, no matter how smart the physicist or perfect her instruments, making certain kinds of predictions about the outcomes of certain quantum phenomena are, well, just plain uncertain.

So, in his oft-paraphrased and widely misunderstood 1926 letter to Max Born, the Great Albert Einstein was, duh! just plain wrong – at least about quantum physics, and perhaps even about God, Who may indeed have some sort of Supreme Gambling Problem.

(Still, “God doesn’t play dice with the Universe” sure sounds right, doesn’t it?)

The Psychological Limitations of “Process” in IT

Wait! Duh! Don’t stop reading. This story has everything to do with Information Technology.

Information Technology’s leaders, of projects and of people, emerge from the fundamentally deterministic world of machines, wherein every action has a 100% predictable outcome. This world, of course, has its unexpected bugs and breakdowns, but the reliable solution for buggy machines is process: time-proven repertoires of well-understood and clearly documented procedures that help mitigate the risks of faulty technology by rigorously squeezing out its pesky uncertainty.

This successful experience with managing machines can easily spur a Quantum Misstep of twisted logic in managing people. “After all,” our inner voice reasons, “aren’t people really just like machines? Of course they are!”

The conclusion sounds right, but it’s dead-wrong. Unlike machines, people, cursed as they are with Free Will, behave, like quantum particles, in fundamentally unpredictable ways. Psychologists have long recognized a “Human Uncertainty Principle” of sorts: the more confined people feel by the processes their leaders impose on them, the less predictable their organizational behavior becomes. IT leaders see process as governance, but those so governed often perceive it as micro-management. Especially in the most talented and creative, micromanagement triggers rebellion rather than compliance.

Frustrated by process, followers find creative ways to avoid following their leaders. In turn, their leaders, dismissing these little mutinies as failures of their Human machines, sharpen their procedures to tighten the harness and regain control, which only provokes further mutiny. As leaders lend greater and greater weight to following process in order to reduce the degrees of freedom for failure in the groups they manage, they unwittingly generate a psychological “black hole” that ensnares all chances of success as well. Individual efforts stall, projects slip, and neglected infrastructure eventually sputters and fails.

A Way Out of the Psychological Singularity

Of course, process certainly plays a role in effective management, but it can’t guarantee effective leadership. Go here and begin learning about the non-deterministic, Zen-like principles of Servant-Leadership: that the true path to leading people starts with serving them; that the most effective way to shepherd their efforts is to set them free.

When you come back from reading, try this new kind of “Non-Process” on for size in 2010:

Step 1. Accept intellectually that people behave in non-deterministic ways, and that, particularly in knowledge-worker fields like IT, this necessarily limits your ability to govern their actions.

Step 2. Once you’ve accepted the basic uncertainty of human behavior, you will naturally begin to question your feelings about your colleagues and subordinates. This fresh uncertainty, while uncomfortable at first, is very healthy. Let it teach you:

The people you “like” best aren’t necessarily your best people
The people you “like” least may, in fact, have the most to offer
While, by behaving unpredictably, machines can only bitterly disappoint you, people, with your permission and support, can very pleasantly surprise you.

Step 3. Beyond articulating the details of tasks, your transcendent role as an IT (or any) leader is to reveal the human value of the larger goals you choose to serve.

Step 4. Once the human value of your organization’s goals have been revealed to them, people will drop the heavy baggage of their personal egos and begin to gravitate toward helping you to achieve them. Remember that they aren’t following you as a leader; they’re following your lead toward something larger than each and all of you. Congratulations! By tapping the source of authentic leadership, you’ve entered the larger world of the Servant-Leader.

Step 5. Never, ever play favorites. Everyone has value, whether you like them personally or not. Treat everyone with respect and, as you support them, they’ll all work hard with you, each in their own wonderfully different way, to help you achieve your organization’s goals. (Remember that, on the other hand, you cheapen the work you’re trying to inspire when you treat it like a win-lose game. You may think you’re being clever, but you undermine your own leadership in the long run when you “play” people for short-term gain.)

Step 6. Full- or part-time employee, contractor, consultant, whatever --everybody’s somebody. Be prepared to recognize everyone for the value of their contributions, regardless of what’s printed on their business cards.

Step 7. Every organization needs its “operators,” the go-to-guys, the t-crossing and i-dotting detail-oriented folks who devise and follow effective processes. But beware the hidden trap of settling for the merely routine and declaring it “excellence.” Excellence is something more.

Which prompts the most important of questions for any organization or society: what is Excellence?

Einstein Finally Redeemed

Is dancing purely a matter of process? Does clear and precise choreography determine the quality of a dance performance? Does putting your feet exactly where and when you’re told make you a dancer? Will carefully following a really precise floor chart make you an excellent dancer?

Dancing, especially good dancing, transcends choreography. Excellent dancers exceed the specifications of choreography. They amaze an audience, and pleasantly surprise their choreographer, as they freely capture and ride the spirit of a performance.

Likewise, in all the work we humans do, how can excellence possibly emerge from simply following a process? Can a really good paint-by-numbers Mona Lisa elevate anyone to the level of a DaVinci?

Following process and meeting expectations is adequacy, and adequacy is virtuous. Adequacy has its place.

But excellence is more. Excellence is the miracle of exceeding expectations. Perhaps because we fear failing to repeat it, we sometimes tend to mistrust excellence. So, we shy away from it, perhaps most often by withholding, from ourselves and others, the freedom on which excellence feeds, which it needs to survive.

Here’s where old Albert, after nearly a lifetime of saying his share of dumb things, got one absolutely right (Out Of My Later Years, 1950):

“Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.”

The Twin Illusions of Conflict and Power

2009-12-14T04:35:00.000-08:00

Aesop's fable, "The Dog in the Manger," concerns a barnyard dog who one afternoon lay down to sleep on top of the hay in the barn's manger.

On being awoken, he growled and barked. "Woof woof!"

He ferociously kept the animals from eating the hay in the manger, even though he couldn't eat the hay himself.

A frustrated ox offers the moral of the story: "people often begrudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves."

The modern discipline of Information Technology gives Aesop's centuries-old fable fresh relevance. Imagine that you're the technical person in charge of your company's newly installed state-of-the-art information system. It might be a complex software tool, like a big-deal Oracle database management system. it might be something simpler but just as important (and expensive), like EMC's latest and greatest networked disk drive array.

You may have helped your organization evaluate and select it. Perhaps you supervised its installation and initial configuration. You've gone over and over its manuals and technical notes for many weeks or months as you've mastered its elaborate ins and outs. You've updated its software and firmware, tweaked and tuned it to perfection, and demonstrated its cool features with pride to your colleagues and management. And, of course, you've upgraded your mental resume, and maybe its embodiment on paper as well, to reflect all of your wonderful new experience with it.

Then, one day, inevitably, others in your organization approach you to make use of it. They ask you for its administrative password, inform you that they plan to migrate some corporate division's data to it, advise you that they intend to connect it to some backup/restore system. In short, they announce their intention to take it from you.

How do you feel about this? After all, it's your system, isn't it? How do you act on those feelings? Do you look for ways to say "yes," or do you look for ways to justify saying "no?"

Thomas and Kilmann Conflict Modes

According to Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann (1974), conflict is a matter of perception rather than fact, and, as such, people can imagine it where it doesn't actually exist. Experience suggests that Information Technology professionals, who tend to entangle their subjective sense of personal self-worth with the objective details of the tools they master, are perhaps more likely to misinterepret as an attack on their ego the logical next-step of handing their beloved tools over to be applied in practice by others. I've known many a colleague who, after insisting that they wanted nothing to do with the day-to-day details of some subsystem they'd installed, nonetheless resisted stubbornly any others who dared try to assume responsibility for it themselves.

Come to think of it, I've been that colleague, and more than once. Was I rightly defending an important technical resource from possible misuse? Or, was I merely defending my own bruised ego? In hindsight, I can tell you that those weren't exactly my finest professional hours.

According to Thomas and Kilmann, people choose to respond to conflict, whether real or imagined, in one of five behavioral modes (see diagram above). There are two ways to cooperate: assertively, by working with the conflicting parties, or more passively, by simply accommodating their wishes.

Thirdly, there's the neutral middle-ground choice of seeking compromise.

And, finally, Thomas and Kilmann posit two ways of saying "No," of refusing cooperation: assertively, by competing, or passively, by avoiding conflict through uncooperative resistance.

Thinking back, as I reacted to the imagined threat my colleague posed when he asked me to hand over that storage subsystem, what choices did I imagine I had?

Active cooperation and passive accommodation would have meant sharing continuing praise and credit for a job well done, my job, with someone else. The middle ground of compromise would have meant surrendering it altogether.

On the other hand, I couldn't actively compete with my colleague for ongoing ownership of the new system, because management wouldn't have supported me, and, besides, I really didn't want that job myself.

So, I resisted. I chewed onto ownership for as long as I could. I snarled at requests for access to the subsystem's passwords. I dogged those last steps needed to make the subsystem operational. And, in doing all of this, I starved my organization of something it needed, delayed others' projects, frustrated others' goals.

What's another word for passive-aggressive behavior? How about "Woof woof."

Discussion Questions:

In your experience, in the context described in this post, would a typical IT manager be more likely to support or change an IT practitioner's passive-aggressive behavior?
What would be a manager's best strategy for dealing with this situation?
How might a frustrated IT practitioner go about changing a passive-aggressive colleague's conflict-handling mode from competitive to cooperative?

"The Little Engine That Could" Could be You

2009-11-16T06:25:00.000-08:00

"I think I can, I think I can," puffed the little "Engine That Could," struggling against all odds to pull a stranded train up a steep hill. And, because it believed that it could, guess what? It actually did!

And, guess what else? Psychological research indicates a scientific basis for this inspirational little tale.

According to research done by social psychologist Albert Bandura in the 1990's, a psychological construct known as perceived self-efficacy is a key determinant in, among many other things, the level of success a professional achieves in their work.

Bandura found that, when people believe in their capabilities to exercise control over their own functioning, and over the events that affect their lives, they perceive themselves to be self-effective. On the assumption that a measurement of the strength of this belief would yield a measurement of the related trait of perceived self-efficacy, psychologist Dr. Ralf Schwarzer developed a simple 10-item test to measure it:

Answer:

1 = Not at all true, 2 = Hardly true, 3 = Moderately true, 4 = Exactly true

to each of the following questions:

1. I can always manage to solve difficult problems if I try hard enough.
2. If someone opposes me, I can find the means and ways to get what I want.
3. It is easy for me to stick to my aims and accomplish my goals.
4. I am confident that I could deal efficiently with unexpected events.
5. Thanks to my resourcefulness, I know how to handle unforeseen situations.
6. I can solve most problems if I invest the necessary effort.
7. I can remain calm when facing difficulties because I can rely on my coping abilities.
8. When I am confronted with a problem, I can usually find several solutions.
9. If I am in trouble, I can usually think of a solution.
10. I can usually handle whatever comes my way.

(You can learn more about this instrument, its validity, what it measures, and how it's been used in years of global research, here.)

Bandura identified four factors that reinforce a person's perceived sense of self-efficacy (listed in no particular order; they're each equally significant):

Mastery experiences - the innate positive sense of satisfaction and accomplishment one gets from having done something well
Observing people similar to oneself managing task demands successfully - learning to be effective by watching others who are effective
Social persuasion that one has the capabilities to succeed in given activities - being told by coworkers and superiors that you have what it takes
Inferences from somatic and emotional states indicative of personal strengths and vulnerabilities - the positive physical, emotional, and cognitive "feedback" one senses while successfully doing a job

Bottom Line: To overcome the impediments, adversities, setbacks, frustrations and inequities of professional life, people need a robust sense of efficacy to sustain the perseverant effort needed to succeed. Research has shown that people with a high degree of perceived self-efficacy, as measured by instruments like Dr. Schwarzer's (see above), tend to perform well in their professions.

Discussion Questions:
Is Self-Efficacy always a valid Perception, or sometimes an Illusion?

The application of Bandura's research to understanding IT task performance, with its uniquely abstract work products, begs several fundamental questions. This post's discussion questions are based on a more skeptical look at Bandura's four foundations of perceived self-efficacy:

Mastery experiences - do IT professionals pat themselves on the back too much, especially for doing off-point technical jobs that they were never actually tasked with?
Observing people similar to oneself managing task demands successfully - what effect does "stealing credit" for something somebody else did have on an individual? More importantly, what effect does it have on colleagues who observed the theft?
Social persuasion that one has the capabilities to succeed in given activities - Really? Is that all it takes? Doesn't such persuasion need to have some basis in fact?
Inferences from somatic and emotional states indicative of personal strengths and vulnerabilities - In the abstract world of IT, how do we differentiate "real" positive work experiences from delusions?

Thanks to my good friend, and avid blog reader, Joe, for pointing me to this humorous example of stolen credit:

How to Be Your Own Worst Enemy

2009-11-09T06:35:00.000-08:00

Thinking back to all those classic Star Trek TV episodes and movies I enjoyed so much as a kid, I realize now that the Mr. Spock character I secretly idolized was, actually, two very different Vulcans.

The "Smart Spock" could always be counted on to perform dizzyingly complex calculations in his head, even under the most dire of circumstances. Bright guy! He always kept his emotions under control, yet he understood and worked very well alongside his chronically overwrought and comparatively slow human colleagues. This Spock was a compassionate and gifted problem-solver.

On the other hand, the "Stupid Spock," for all his obvious cognitive skills, consistently miscalculated the feelings of others and had a great deal of difficulty understanding and controlling even the simplest of his own long-repressed emotions. Dense dork! At his best, this Stupid Spock seemed comical alongside his wise and well-rounded human buddies. At his worst, he was a dysfunctional mess who often inadvertently put the human crew members on the Enterprise at risk.

What does Smart Spock have that Stupid Spock doesn't? Emotional Intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence is a psychological construct that explains the variable ability of people, functioning in social and professional contexts, to understand and manage their own emotions while recognizing and adapting to the emotions of others.

Emotionally intelligent people, like Smart Spock, can overcome, and perhaps sometimes even harness, their own feelings and the feelings of others to function effectively in social and professional situations. Because emotionally intelligent people can make others feel valued and understood, people enjoy working with them and enthusiastically help them to get things done.

Emotionally unintelligent people, like Stupid Spock, fall prey to their emotions, which can hamper or even disable them. Insensitive or even scornful of the feelings of those around them, emotionally unintelligent people are often left to work alone.

Referring to those who are manifestly most deficient in Emotional Intelligence, Alexithymia is a common risk factor for a variety of personal and social problems. For example, people with alexithymia:

can't identify feelings, and often confuse their emotions with the physical sensations (e.g., headaches, nausea) of emotional arousal
can't describe their own feelings to other people, or put into words the emotions they observe in others
have difficulty imagining alternatives (as evidenced by a paucity of fantasies) in solving practical problems.

Was Stupid Spock's problem on Star Trek that he couldn't understand, control, or adapt to emotions? Or, was that he didn't care enough to try?

Maybe that's what made a Smart guy like Spock so maddeningly Stupid sometimes.

Questions:

Do you think there's a difference between ordinary empathy and Emotional Intelligence? What do you think it is?
In practical terms, how do you think Emotional Intelligence (or a lack thereof) might affect the performance of a technical task, or the outcome of an Information Technology project?
What do you imagine would be the first step toward increasing your own Emotional Intelligence?
How might you begin to coach an EI-challenged colleague?
When working with someone who may have Alexithymia, what kind of professional behavior should you avoid?

Chickens, Pigs, and Superpigs

2009-11-02T05:33:00.000-08:00

Q: What's the difference between a chicken and a pig?

A: In a bacon and egg breakfast, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.

Following up on this blog's last post about Belbin's inventory of team roles, when it comes to any given role that might be played on an Information Technology project team, there are those who calculate, track, and complain about the length of the critical path, and those who take action to shorten it.

In psychological terms, involved team members observe failures, such as missed deadlines and unrealized goals, in a cerebral and detached way, as if from the outside. These folks offer great comments at post mortem meetings.

On the other hand, committed team members feel such failures as emotionally painful, and this spurs them to act pre mortem, often heroically, to prevent failures.

Various theories of psychodynamics postulate a mechanism, cathexis, to explain the committed individual's investment of their mental and emotional energy in playing an activist role in making their team successful.

A growing school of management theory, Servant-Leadership, suggests that, by persistently demonstrating selfless service to their colleagues in joint pursuit of the goals of their team, committed members can trigger cathexis in their merely involved co-workers. In other words, there are some Pigs who, magically, seem to be able to turn the Chickens around them into more Pigs. Let's call these inspirational players Superpigs, and, when it comes to getting things done, and done properly, theirs is, indeed, a very handy superpower.

So, on IT teams, there are always Chickens, sometimes Pigs, and, every now and then, Superpigs. Which begs these important questions:

What can C-Suite executives and line managers do to support the Pigs in their organizations, and foster the emergence of Superpigs?
What common managers' mistakes (inadvertent, of course) tend to demotivate Pigs and turn them into mere Chickens?
What factors motivate the Pigs? How are a Superpig's motivations different?

Do Super People Help Make Super Teams?

2009-10-25T05:53:00.000-07:00

The really big challenges demand a team effort, and the most effective teams are staffed by the best-equipped people.

According to Dr. R. Meredith Belbin, certain key contributors on effective teams possess unique powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men:

Plant

Plants are creative, unorthodox and idea generators. If an innovative solution to a problem is needed, a Plant is a good person to ask. A good plant will be bright and free-thinking. Plants can tend to ignore incidentals and refrain from getting bogged down in detail. The Plant bears a strong resemblance to the popular caricature of the absentminded professor-inventor, and often has a hard time communicating ideas to others.

Resource Investigator

The Resource Investigator gives a team a rush of enthusiasm at the start of the project by vigorously pursuing contacts and opportunities. He or she is focused outside the team, and has a finger firmly on the pulse of the outside world. Where a Plant creates new ideas, a Resource Investigator will quite happily steal them from other companies or people. A good Resource Investigator is a maker of possibilities and an excellent networker, but has a tendency to lose momentum towards the end of a project and to forget small details.

Coordinator

A Coordinator often becomes the default chairperson of a team, stepping back to see the big picture. Coordinators are confident, stable and mature and because they recognise abilities in others, they are very good at delegating tasks to the right person for the job. The Coordinator clarifies decisions, helping everyone else focus on their tasks. Coordinators are sometimes perceived to be manipulative, and will tend to delegate all work, leaving nothing but the delegating for them to do.

Shaper

The shaper is a task-focused leader who abounds in nervous energy, who has a high motivation to achieve and for whom winning is the name of the game. The shaper is committed to achieving ends and will ‘shape’ others into achieving the aims of the team. He or she will challenge, argue or disagree and will display aggression in the pursuit of goal achievement. Two or three shapers in a group, according to Belbin, can lead to conflict, aggravation and in-fighting.

Monitor Evaluator

Monitor Evaluators are fair and logical observers and judges of what is going on. Because they are good at detaching themselves from bias, they are often the ones to see all available options with the greatest clarity. They take everything into account, and by moving slowly and analytically, will almost always come to the right decision. However, they can become excessively cynical, damping enthusiasm for anything without logical grounds, and they have a hard time inspiring themselves or others to be passionate about their work.

Teamworker

A Teamworker is the greasy oil between the cogs that keeps the machine that is the team running. They are good listeners and diplomats, talented at smoothing over conflicts and helping parties understand each other without becoming confrontational. The beneficial effect of a Teamworker is often not noticed until they are absent, when the team begins to argue, and small but important things cease to happen. Because of an unwillingness to take sides, a Teamworker may not be able to take decisive action when it is needed.

Implementer

The Implementer takes what the other roles have suggested or asked, and turns their ideas into positive action. They are efficient and self-disciplined, and can always be relied on to deliver on time. They are motivated by their loyalty to the team or company, which means that they will often take on jobs everyone else avoids or dislikes. However, they may be seen as closed-minded and inflexible since they will often have difficulty deviating from their own well-thought-out plans.

Completer Finisher

The Completer Finisher is a perfectionist and will often go the extra mile to make sure everything is "just right," and the things he or she delivers can be trusted to have been double-checked and then checked again. The Completer Finisher has a strong inward sense of the need for accuracy, rarely needing any encouragement from others because that individual's own high standards are what he or she tries to live up to. They may frustrate their teammates by worrying excessively about minor details and refusing to delegate tasks that they do not trust anyone else to perform.

Specialist

Specialists are passionate about learning in their own particular field. As a result, they will have the greatest depth of knowledge, and enjoy imparting it to others. They are constantly improving their wisdom. If there is anything they do not know the answer to, they will happily go and find it. Specialists bring a high level of concentration, ability, and skill in their discipline to the team, but can only contribute on that narrow front and will tend to be uninterested in anything which lies outside its narrow confines.

Questions for discussion:

Which of these roles do you think might be most important to meeting the challenges faced by an Information Technology team?
How likely is it that one person will fill more than one of Belbin's roles on an IT Team?
Are people born with Belbin's "powers," or can they acquire them?

Ready, Fire, Aim, Paint New Targets

2009-10-12T08:07:00.000-07:00

I always seem to find the shopping cart with the misaligned wheel, despite what I'm sure is a whole lot of engineering and management "process" that goes into preventing this little annoyance. Oh, well, maybe I should just learn to accept that shopping cart misalignment is an unavoidable fact of life?
.
Speaking of inevitable misalignment, let's switch gears and talk about the equally pervasive misalignment of Information Technology, and the people who, for all their well-intentioned "process," seem unable to prevent, and perhaps even unintentionally foster, the problem.
.
IT Alignment: everyone wants it, but, if you ask the average CEO, practically nobody seems to have fully realized it. Why?

.
IT alignment demands the simultaneous targeting of four basic organizational goals:

Optimizing and applying the individual talent of the IT professionals on staff, consultants and employees alike, to...
...meet the day-to-day business requirements of the individual corporate clients they serve, while...
...shepherding the collective design efforts of all IT professionals on staff: the hardware, software, and networking tools they use; the solutions they buy or build; and the architecture they establish, all to support...

...the achievement of the collective organizational mission of the company as a whole, as embodied in the various operational and customer-focused initiatives of corporate management.

Whether instinctively or consciously, every IT manager understands this. However, because the essential identity of an IT organization is defined more by its reactive response to immediate technical contingencies than by its proactive contribution to long-range business planning, IT leaders typically tackle these four targets separately rather than simultaneously:

In reacting to the myriad things that go wrong in an IT environment, IT leadership understandably establishes isolated processes to manage and measure their performance in hitting each of these targets, and voila! Misalignment.

Psychologically speaking, how do IT managers reconcile and accept having to live with this misalignment? All it take is a little cognitive dissonance: "Ready, fire, aim." Then, by clever application of a few cooked-to-order metrics, they paint new targets wherever their arrows land, and pat themselves on the back for hitting the bullseyes. Situation ethics, after all, can make a virtue of any vice, and are a well-known means of rationalizing and taking comfort in situational behavior.

How do we fix this situational misalignment of Information Technology?

I think I know. But, who cares what I think?

What do you think?

Imagine The Enemy Within

2009-10-08T08:16:00.000-07:00

"O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!

My tables—meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain—
At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark."

- Hamlet Act 1, scene 5, 105–109

It may seem hard to imagine, but a trusted employee or colleague (and not just those found in Denmark, Mr. Shakespeare) might secretly be acting against you or your organization:

"Workers who sabotage corporate systems are almost always IT workers who exhibit specific negative office behavior..."

In a 2006 study, the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University notes several psychological factors that may motivate "Insider Spies and Saboteurs:"

Extreme sensitivity to criticism
Unusual needs for attention
Chronic frustration and feeling unappreciated
Difficulties controlling anger with bursts of inappropriate temper
Chronic sense of victimization or mistreatment
Chronic grudges against others
Belief, and conduct, reflecting the sense that the insider is above the rules applicable to others due to special characteristics or suffering
Chronic interpersonal problems and conflicts (including physical conflicts) such that the insider is avoided by others or they “walk on eggshells” around him or her
Compensatory behaviors reflecting underlying self-esteem problems such as bragging, bullying, spending on fantasy-related items
Chronic difficulties dealing with life challenges indicating an inability to realistically assess his or her strengths, limitations, resources—overspending, overestimating his abilities and underestimating others, attempting to gain positions for which he or she clearly lacks training or qualifications
Use of compartmentalization such that the insider has no problems living with contradictions between his maladaptive behavior and espoused beliefs (an allegedly religious individual who cheats on his wife or expenses)
Lack of inhibitory capabilities such as a conscience, impulse control, empathy for others, comprehension of the impact of actions on others, or any regard for the feelings of others such that the insider is chronically offending or exploiting those around him or her

Their report on the subject offers several telltale behavioral markers that may indicate the presence of the problem in your organization:

Bullying
Chronic insecurity
Intimidation of others
Refusal to conform to rules
Chronic complaining
Chronic disregard for, and manipulation of, the office policies and practices
Threatening the life of those opposing him
Stealing items from work
Admitted theft of computer equipment
Access from a new employer’s system without displaying remorse
Withholding of information from team members
Intimidation of team members to the extent they were fearful for their safety

Followers of this blog might recognize some overlap with the characteristics of the passive-aggressive worker and organization.

Of course, while they may not be very productive, "disgruntled employees" usually aren't maliciously so, and they rarely commit outright bad acts of espionage and sabotage.

Just the same, the Sofware Engineering Institute's report (you'll find it here) certainly highlights the importance of keeping your privileged passwords secure.

Think You're "All That?" If So, You Aren't

2009-10-06T09:24:00.000-07:00

Something to think about before opening your big fat mouth:

People who boast of being "the best" typically score lower than average in objective tests of the superior competence they claim.

On the other hand, people who score well in competence tests tend to underrate their competence relative to others.

In other words, those who brag often do so without basis, while those with authentic professional lights to shine often hide them under a barrel.

IT managers would do well to remember that the illusion of superiority is a well-researched cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. When taking their people at their word, they should take this psychological factor into consideration as well.

IT practitioners: next time you loudly proclaim yourself to be the best and brightest Cisco/Microsoft/Visual Basic/Unix/Whatever genius on your block, keep in mind that you may be revealing more of your true self than you'd like.

What's IT All About, Anyway?

2009-10-02T06:06:00.000-07:00

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

- Edsger Dijkstra, 1930-2002

I've been in computing for a long time, working on countless projects, large and small, at every level of the OSI Systems Inrterconnection Reference Model. Over a longer span of years than vanity allows me to enumerate here, I've been "'round the block," as they say.

So, I wondered how it was, then, that my kids always managed to stump me by asking the simplest possible question: Dad, what do you do for a living?

For all my experience programming, installing, upgrading, configuring, maintaining, and retiring thousands of "things," could it be that I didn't really know, in any fundamental sense, what I was doing? That I'd never come to terms with the deep basics of Information Technology?

So many things, so many distractions: computers, from laptops to servers to mainframes; data storage systems, from high-end multi-terabyte farms to the tiny iPod; the dizzying array of networking widgets, from firewalls to gateways to hubs...

So many things, each with their own special language to learn and master... But, does their mastery make me an auhentic master, or just some modern-day Nimrod?

Question: Peering past all these distractions, straining to find a way out of Babel, what is all of our "stuff" really for?

"Time Keeps on Slipping, Slipping, Slipping..."

2009-09-30T09:32:00.000-07:00

The underlying cause of IT managers' chronic screaming and yelling about projects that never seem to be finished may, in fact, be their screaming and yelling.

An article on procrastination in Psychology Today suggests that procrastination is, at least in part, a response to the screaming and yelling of authoritarian management.

Attention managers: yelling may feel good, but it doesn't work. In fact, your yelling may further entrench the very behavior you seek to change.

So, alright then, what does work?

Kitchen timers. That's right, kitchen timers.

According to a guy named Francesco Cirillo, a simple kitchen timer can help focus an individual's attention on getting tasks started. A description of his "Pomodoro Technique" (his kitchen timer is shaped like a tomato, the Italian word for which is "pomodoro") of time management can be found at http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/.

Perhaps the solution for the chronically delayed completion of IT tasks and projects is finding ways of getting them started in the first place? For some procrastinators, a little investment in a kitchen timer might yield large returns in productivity

Don't Hate Me Because I'm a Customer

2009-09-26T06:33:00.000-07:00

The computer support person in this clip from "The Office" (UK) clearly hates someone. A few questions for discussion:

Whom does he hate? And, why?
Should this behavior be confronted or ignored? If confronted, how, and by whom?
How will this sort of behavior affect this employee's job performance metrics (e.g., support tickets closed, problems resolved, etc.)?
What effect might you expect his behavior to have on that of his IT co-workers?
What do these kinds of chronic work habits say about the values of the organization that tolerates them?

When it comes to passive-aggressive organizational behavior, acceptance is merely avoidance, and it's a bad option for everyone. Don't tolerate the intolerable, in yourself, or in those who serve.

A "Buddy System" for Software Engineers

2009-09-20T16:04:00.000-07:00

What's the difference between "head count" and "mind count"?

This post shares an interesting article recommended by a reader of this blog. (Thanks, Chris.)

A recent New York Times article describes a "buddy system" called pair programming that claims increased productivity (specifically, faster coding and quicker debugging) for software engineers.

The thoughtless IT manager might wonder about the business sense of putting two expensive "heads" on one job. The smart manager, however, realizes that, when it comes to cognitive effort, productivity and head count are, at best, only loosely correlated, and recognizes the psychological reasons why, when it comes to writing code, two "minds" can indeed be better than one:

Increaded focus and attention on assigned tasks
Less time wasted doing "off-topic" things
Heightened motivation to finish coding jobs on time and within budget
Less "ego involvement" and more common sense in the coding process
Built-in mentoring for the junior member of the pair

A few more cognitive activites that might benefit from a "paired-mind" approach:

Root Cause Analysis (2nd- or 3rd-level problem resolution)
Short-Term Task Management (e.g., implementations, migrations)
Product or Technology Reseach, and Selection of Candidate Solutions

Can you think of any others? Leave a comment here, or on the corresponding LinkedIn or Facebook discussion topics.

When Did the Wheels Fall Off the Welcome Wagon?

2009-09-16T01:44:00.000-07:00

An e-mail message from a reader reports that, in her last three positions over eight years, she was shown her desk on her first day of work, and then abandoned.

No manager visited her to describe her job on her first day at work. Or her second. Or even her third.

Instead, her co-workers showed her the local ropes and explained what her group was supposed to be doing for a living.

IT Professionals: has this ever happened to you?

IT Managers and Leaders: does your company have a procedure for welcoming new hires? If not, do you have one of your own?

Shut up and Reboot

2009-09-07T19:05:00.000-07:00

Q: Why work hard at digging up the root cause of a problem when a simple problem-solving heuristic might alleviate its symptoms and put off having to actually fix it for, like, forever?

A: Tsk tsk, you don't really expect an answer, do you? A better question would be:

Q: Why do IT professionals settle for simple 'rules of thumb' in solving technical problems rather than work to find the authentic solutions that fix their root causes?

A: When (otherwise rational) people, under time pressure to solve a practical problem, judge that the properly calculated solution might be too time-consuming or complex for them to figure out, they often (irrationally) apply easier, more familiar, but less appropriate problem-solving behaviors. They resort to habitual rituals that have "worked" for them in solving other problems over the years, or fire up some troubleshooting tool or method they've used successfully before, or substitute some simpler analysis of the problem in place of the harder one. In effect, rather than solve the problem at hand, they imagine a simpler one and solve that instead.

"Successful" (that is, more "adaptive") IT professionals can be very good at playing this game. Their solutions may not be "real" ones, but they're often good enough approximations to mask the problem's symptoms for a while, long enough to close a ticket, merit a brisk pat on the back, maybe even earn a bonus.

Sound delusional? Well, it is, but the imagined reduction in the "pain" associated with a superficially addressed problem is often counted as a victory over it, and the resulting short-term kudos, however undeserved, can feel just as satisfying as arriving at the real answer.

This is a cognitive bias called attribute substitution, and it's the root cause of many errors in judgment in Information Technology.

To help illustrate attribute substitution, try solving this example problem: together, a toy bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Did you quickly arrive at ten cents for the ball? Most people do. Rather than dredge up memories of High School algebra, most people would rather simply subtract the $1 difference in cost between the bat and the ball from the $1.10 total figure, concluding -- incorrectly -- that the ball costs a dime.

Here's the correct answer: Bought separately, the ball costs five cents, the bat costs $1.05, totalling to $1.10 and satisfying the constraint that the bat costs a dollar more than the ball. Attribute substution probably costs the average SAT test-taker 100 points on their math score.

What's the "cure" for attribute substitution?

Where possible, Information Technology managers, leaders, and supervisors need to relax the push to fix things quickly in favor of emphasizing the value of solving problems fundamentally. Do you measure the resolution of technical problems in your organization? Where possible, your metrics should reflect the depth of those solutions.

For their part, IT professionals need to question their own reasoning and emotional motivations in solving technical problems. Do you feel driven to announce a solution first? When someone else solves a problem before you do, do you feel as though you've "lost?" You're prone to attribute substitution if you answered "yes" to either of those questions.

Q: What's more important, arriving at any plausible answer quickly, or finding the correct answer?

Working on solving a problem? Force yourself to ask "why" at least five times. Probing iteratively is hard work and time consuming, but it arrives at real answers.

The Clueless Manager

2009-08-30T05:40:00.000-07:00

When asked in our Facebook poll last week to identify the source of their greatest IT frustration, two out of three respondents picked the answer "Oblivious, clueless, or disengaged management."

If it's true that we laugh hardest at familiar folly, then maybe the Pointy-Haired Boss (PHB) character in Scott Adams' Dilbert comic strip is so uproariously funny because, apparently, 66% of all IT professionals work for him?

For those who don't follow Dilbert, a PHB is a "mind bogglingly stupid boss lacking foresight, technical knowledge, leadership skills, morality and/or tact." (From the Urban Dictionary)

Nobody consciously sets out to become a Pointy-Haired Boss, but, in the creative perception of their colleagues and subordinates, all-too-many IT managers seem to unconsciously shout "Look at Me! I'm a PHB!"

How is it that, when an IT manager or leader says engaging, positive, and affirming things like:

    “How’s it going?”
    “What do you think?”
    “How can we help?”
    “Nice work.”
    “Thanks.”

Their employees and team members hear instead:

    “You can be replaced.”
    “You’re going nowhere.”
    “Your opinion is worthless.”
    “You can’t do anything right.”
    “You’ll never be good enough.”

Pointy-Haired Bosses declare themselves as such not by what they explicitly say, but by their subtle behavioral traits, which "speak" far louder than mere words. These are examples of quiet ways to loudly proclaim "Look at me! I'm a PHB!"

- Interrupting face-to-face meetings to take cell phone calls
- Disciplining employees in front of others
- Leaving meetings abruptly because “something came up”
- Arriving late for scheduled appointments or meetings
- Micromanaging the "how" of tasks assigned to subordinates
- Announcing top-level reorganizations without explaining their significance to the people in lower-level positions

___________________

(This entire Dilbert montage is funny, but you'll find the best example clip of this post's point 1 minute in.)

"We're Clueless!" is never explicitly pronounced; it's implied by our behavior. "Clueless" is perceived, and, in this and all matters of human behavior, perception is truth.

Understanding "Don't" Diligence

2009-08-25T03:09:00.000-07:00

Due Diligence: the performance of an act with a certain standard of care. Expressed in other words, "covering all the bases" in the thorough pursuit of a (usually professional) goal.

Don't Diligence: Concealing passive-aggressive, obstructionist behavior behind a plausible-looking veneer of Due Diligence. In other words, protracting the completion of a finite task by inserting an infinite number of requisite sub-tasks within it. Deliverables dealt the Death by a thousand cuts. Projects shot stone dead with Zeno's Arrow.

"Can God make a rock so heavy that she can't lift it?" I don't know about God*, but thousands of lesser beings in Information Technology manage this paradoxical miracle every day.

_____________

* "Damn it, Jim. I'm a psychologist, not a theologian."

Does Ego Drive Information System Design?

2009-08-23T05:41:00.000-07:00

What role does human ego play in the design and implementation of Enterprise IT solutions?

Are IT systems as over-complicated (and over-budget and over-due and...) as they often are because their designers seek self-glorification in them? Or perhaps because their implementers are so threatened by the risks they represent that they insert an overabundance of redundant and superfluous "t's" and "i's" just so they can cross and dot them in the name of (perpetual) due diligence?"

You'll find a complete description of the problem, its many hidden costs, some hints at its cause, and some suggestion for dealing with it, in the article Radically Simple IT, from the Harvard Business Review:

http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2008/03/radically-simple-it/ar/1

The psychological and behavioral causes of IT problems often escape IT managers and leaders, who are "wired" to look only for rational explanations and solutions.

Subtle Violence

2009-08-22T08:11:00.000-07:00

When you communicate in a work setting, with a subordinate or a colleague, do you coerce the response that you want to hear?

Or, do you listen for new ideas, even if that means someone else might get credit for them?

Take ten minutes to watch -- and listen to -- Marshall Rosenberg in this video.

Coercive Communication is Violent Communication. Listening presupposes an openness to change and a willingness to accept.

The Passive-Aggressive Organization

2009-07-17T16:26:00.000-07:00

From a study by Booz Allen, this document describes the toxic effects of passive-aggressive group dynamics on an organization's ability to execute. Because their lines of responsibility (tasks to be completed) are orthogonal to (that is, almost completely independent of) their lines of authority, technology-focused groups are particularly susceptible to this "disorder."

http://www.boozallen.com/media/file/143242.pdf

Medieval Helpdesk

2009-07-16T16:02:00.000-07:00

This video shows the time-honored, traditional value of showing patience in dealing with a user's insecurity.

(Also, it's pretty darn funny. )

What is Passive-Aggressive Behavior?

2009-07-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

Known clinically as the Negativistic Personality Disorder, here are the "symptoms" of passive-aggressive behavior (from Appendix B of the DSM IV)

Passive Resistance (Procrastination, Inefficiency) to Fulfilling Occupational Tasks
Complaints of Being Misunderstood, Unappreciated, Victimized
Sullenness, Irritability, and Argumentativeness in Response to Expectations
Angry and Pessimistic Attitudes Toward a Variety of Events
Unreasonable Criticism and Scorn Toward Those in Authority
Envy and Resentment Toward Those who are More Fortunate
Inclined to Whine and Grumble about Being “Jinxed”
Alternating Behavior Between Hostile Assertion of Personal Autonomy and Dependent Contrition

I dare you to watch one of these characters in action. Or, rather, in-action.

As you watch, keep in mind that I can't be held responsible for any damage or injury you might cause to surrounding furniture or pets.

We know these people. We work with them. We are them.

Passive-aggressive behavior is everywhere, a fact of life. Nothing can be done about it, right?

Wrong.

Passive-aggressive behavior is a choice. As with any socially maladaptive "bad" behavior, passive-aggressive habits can be identified and "broken," in others and in ourselves.

Join our LinkedIn Discussion Group!

2009-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

The Psychopathology of Information Technology

The psychological and sociological factors that hinder IT organizations

Visit our Discussion Group on LinkedIn and Join the Conversation.

Read this Blog's Most Recent Post.

Leave a comment - here, or on LinkedIn.
Looking forward to hearing from you.