Ready, Fire, Aim, Paint New Targets

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?
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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.
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IT Alignment: everyone wants it, but, if you ask the average CEO, practically nobody seems to have fully realized it. Why?

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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.

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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.

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How do we fix this situational misalignment of Information Technology?

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

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What do you think?

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

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.

Shut up and Reboot

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.