As we proceed in our efforts to automate the systems and processes at my employer, some individuals are behaving in increasingly odd/irrational ways.
Some background:
The primary reason for the initiative was to break the in-agility cycle within IT. Business processes had grown increasingly complex in response to an increasingly complex infrastructure to the point that it took two weeks to do nearly anything. Administrators of all stripes were overworked and reliability was suffering.
Logically, you’d expect the overworked masses to welcome automation with open arms and you’d be DEAD WRONG. Instead, the effort was met with “You can’t do that” and outright stonewalling. On one level, the reaction was natural: The fear of change coupled with a fear of job loss is a powerful motivator for people to do seemingly irrational things. On another level, it made no sense at all. These were the very people who would benefit most from the very thing that we were proposing.
The situation, I’m sad to say, hasn’t changed much.
I’ve spent some time thinking about this and I think I’ve arrived at something (a framework) that might explain what we’ve seen. I think it breaks down into three parts:
1. Fear Trumps Reason
If any part of the equation involves fear (real or imagined) you can kiss reason goodbye. A few thousand years of evolution hasn’t overcome the core “fight or flight” reflex deep within us all. To me, this explains about 80% of what we’ve seen.
2. Pioneer vs.Settler
If you are leading a transformative change, chances are that you are a pioneer. Pioneers could give a shit about what came before; it’s about what will be. There are precious few pioneers.
Settlers have the Yin to the Pioneer’s Yang. (There’s a band name there.) They are talented at developing what the Pioneers started and slowly maturing it.
If you task a Settler to work on a project with a bunch of Pioneers, what you get is frustration. The Settlers can’t understand why the Pioneers are being unreasonable (designing the next “thing”) and the Pioneers are tearing their hair out over the Settler’s unyielding adherence to “old ways of thinking”.
3. Solving The Wrong Problem
In complex systems, it’s sometimes hard to identify the root cause. Doubly so if the system in question is still under development. When the system is still under development, it’s tempting to get lost in all the possible use cases. What started as an effort to simplify the problem quickly devolves into a stream of endless “what-if” use cases that may or may not have any validity to the business. The project will stagnate in pointless analysis.
I hope this becomes a discussion point for those of you that pushing forward with similar efforts. What do you think?