Tag Archives: cautionary tale

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Rage On

It’s a strange way to end a strange year.

About a decade ago I wrote a book about an internet uprising in support of a pair of unlikely criminals who kidnapped a pair of executives after accidentally killing a businessperson during the abduction. In hindsight, it’s a bit eerie given current events.

The book is called This Is Rage. It’s a novel of outlandish observations and counterintuitive character behavior I assembled from a career in technology and media. Much of the underlying ethos had been eating at me in repeated cycles. My goal was to paint in the extreme, to bridge the dying days of old world communication with the uncharted future of a world without filters. It was meant to be outrageous, plausible only at the fringes, a look into events that possibly could happen, but held resonance more as a cautionary tale than a slice of life.

I knew the premise was plausible because I’ve been a student of the commercial internet since it entered our lives. I watched it bring out the worst in people, particularly behind anonymity, but also the ways uncontainable sentiment could be exploited by businesses, politicians, and other special interests. I knew the events could spin out beyond the control of those seeding them, while a clever few would convince themselves they could harness the battered convictions of those who felt forgotten.

I meant it as satire in the spirit of Tom Wolfe. In the years that followed, the line between satire and reality began to blur. Then one day, it seemed to me the line was gone.

Skits on Saturday Night Live and news headlines often became indistinguishable. Something called fake news became identified as unreliable information emerging from unconfirmed sources that took on snowball effects with implied credibility. Just as we got our heads around the notion of fake news, it became an easy label for anything someone didn’t want to believe. Deepfakes, videos that appeared to be evidence of real activity, were revealed to be manipulated images edited for effect without regard for truth. The act of lying was sometimes referred to as alternative facts.

Imagine that, alternative facts as a reality we should consider.

This confluence of powerful, widely distributed technology and internet anarchy has exceeded most of what I imagined, yet the one storyline I hoped was long into the future no longer is. While I anticipated the fiery populism most often expressed with unchecked anonymity, I held the belief that human character would nonetheless gravitate toward a sense of justice. The stretch in my satire was that in fully unrestrained expression, a villain could in the public eye become a hero. This to me was a bridge too far, and that if a movement began to form in that direction, the goodness in us would win out. The failings in our logic would become uncomfortably apparent.

I was wrong. Today the headlines tell us popular sympathy can align behind a villain if the circumstances motivating a crime are deemed by spiraling opinion somehow more pernicious than the crime itself. It was impossible then and it is impossible now for me to believe a vote of internet emotion can take the side of the criminal who murders an insurance executive because he finds the victim’s business unethical. I say it is impossible to believe, and yet it is reality.

How did we get here? As I have written so many times before, the implications of the technology weaving through our lives takes its toll whether we understand it or not. Our ability to digest the psychological impact of technology can’t keep pace with the deployment of its power. We use the internet freely, we express ourselves in whatever form of truth we believe is appropriate, but the ability to decipher how our behavior is being altered eludes us as individuals and in the collective.

There are no alternative facts unless we allow them. Fake news is not a convenience unless we allow it be. Villains are not heroes unless we allow them to be.

There will be more rage, I am assured of that. People are angry, confused, and sadly turned against each other for the gains of those who fuel the rage. While we are free to express ourselves without restraint in anonymity, it’s hard for me to think of that as freedom when we could be empowering each other with shared values and vetted knowledge.

We don’t need to hide behind falsehoods. If we are made to feel afraid for saying the emperor has no clothes, we need to rediscover the courage to stand ahead of the herd. Transparency may prove increasingly challenging in a world gone mad, but actual facts are available if we commit to the work of identifying them. Argue with data and a passion for clarity over impulse.

It is a privilege to write for you, and I believe I have one at least one more book in me. Before I get to that, I am going to have to come to terms with what is meant by satire, and whether being predictive has any value at all. Irony is only a teacher if the comparisons we attempt are rooted in decency that is broadly recognized.

As we begin a new year, remember that there are facts worth unearthing, unsung heroes all around us worth celebrating, and plenty of villains playing out schemes to convince us they are worthy of trust. I’ll finish the year on a thread of optimism and say that together we can separate a worthy example from a fabricated manipulation. The choice to offer applause only when it has been earned remains at our discretion.

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Image: Pixabay

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The Compartments We Devise

 

We never know the full story when we look into someone else’s eyes. It doesn’t matter who it is. Our spouses, our children, our friends, our business colleagues—we all have chapters in our stories that are as yet untold or never told. It will always be that way. The best we can do is get better at listening, remain open to compassion, and craft compartmentalization strategies to balance the myriad conflicts that attempt to overrun us even when we appear to be at our best.

Appearance is always deceptive. It’s why writers have something to write about. It’s why most of us like to read stories, see plays, and watch movies. We trust storytellers to reveal to us the points of backstory we need to piece together a coherent narrative. Sometimes we call that entertainment. Other times we call it the awakening inspired by a cautionary tale.

Life instruction is much harder. Think about the people you will encounter this week. Which of the following might they be experiencing and trying to integrate into the disjointed career demands of their workplace and the to-do lists filling their calendars:

  • Might they have a dear friend in the hospital with a terrible disease?
  • Might they have just learned one friend is getting divorced and another divorced a year ago in silence?
  • Might they be looking for ways to support people living far away whose lives are being devastated by a natural disaster?
  • Might they have bet heavily on a seemingly safe investment and lost enormously in its bankruptcy?
  • Might they have heard from the IRS that no matter how careful they were on their tax filings they are being audited?
  • Might they have recently discovered their retirement savings will not sustain them as they had planned for decades?
  • Might they have signed up for a critical deadline at work that is no longer achievable?

Don’t fret; odds are not all of this is likely to happen, at least not at the same time. Yet no matter how well things may be going or appear to be going for someone, you can be assured strife of some sort is lurking behind the curtain. None of us are invincible. None of us can entirely hide from adversity.

You never know any of this is happening to someone until it is revealed—and often it is never revealed, or revealed so long after it occurred you can be of no help. Other times it is you who are overwhelmed by the conflicts hidden from others. Life’s twists and turns find us all. We all have stories no different from tales we read, built on conflict, secrets, revelations, and resolutions.

Some people are better at maintaining the status quo no matter how hard they are being side-swiped in the dark. You know that person at work who seems superhuman, who just keeps delivering and never utters a peep about any kind of distraction or digression. You ask yourself how that person pulls it off. You wonder if such stoicism is sustainable.

Often these “superheroes” (or robots) are not as bulletproof as you think. They might just be very good at separating their life into components, ruling out clouding aspects of conflict to focus on the task at hand. That’s a skill, one that can be developed. Those who are particularly good at it know one thing for certain: it is not a magical power. It does not come with unlimited gas in the tank. It’s a bridge, and while it can be a long one, the beams supporting it are not infinite in strength.

Devising compartments is a coping strategy. Almost everyone figures out how to do this to survive, some better than others. When someone is too good at it, we might think them cold-hearted. That may seem an apt critique in the throes of emotional exhaustion, but it may not be a warranted conclusion.

When we segment our lives into compartments, we attempt to deal with difficult things separately, one at a time, one hour and one day at a time.

The problem with these compartments is that no matter how well we think we construct them, they all have not-so-secret wormholes connecting them. They send messages to each other through an impenetrable network. They shares walls of the same real estate. Those walls are thin by design.

Compartments are awkward. The storyteller knows this, which is why we listen to the storyteller. When the storyteller is ourself, there is all the more reason to listen.

Sometimes I think of song lyrics that have resonated with me and helped me develop perspectives on the compartments of my own life and those I observe in others. In his first solo album in 1984, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd wrote a very simple phrase that has stuck with me:

I recognize myself in every stranger’s eyes.

These simple words of reflection and contemplation put us all on the same playing field. When you take in the faces you pass along the street, each one constitutes a life that likely contains the same levels of success and failure, bonding and betrayal, health and illness, triumph and capitulation. The same holds true for school, for work, for community service, for the organizations you join for camaraderie and insight.

You don’t know the stories of the people around you any more than they know yours. Those stories are difficult and complex. The question is whether the obstacles in those stories will be overwhelming.

Sometimes you can help. More often you really can’t. When you integrate the compartments of your life with theirs, you can always move toward a path of shared understanding.

If you recognize the breakdown of artificial deconstruction in tales of fiction, you can recognize it in the real people around you. More important, you can trust yourself to see it in your own machinations. When you acknowledge the connections in your own compartments, they cease to be traps. That’s when compartments become shared spaces. That’s when real character building begins.

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Photo: Pixabay

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The Quality Chronicles

BugThe recent “failed IPO” of BATS has to be a cautionary tale. This wasn’t just a deal that didn’t price or trade according to plan. A software bug caused it to be withdrawn. You don’t hear that one too often.

A bug killed an IPO?

There is no argument that we live in a world of staggering speed, where competitors race to meet customer needs and time to market matters. Innovation is always factored by the ticking click, who gets the jump and the competitive advantage, when a cost center becomes a profit center. Information compounds on our desktops, the team with analysis paralysis most often loses to the nimble risk takers—but all this means is that in product development, the role of Quality Assurance (QA) has never been more critical.

I have often heard the mantra from development teams: “Better, Faster, Cheaper—we can give you any two and a half.” Believe me, I understand trade-offs. All product development is tempered by tough decisions that incorporate a series of smart and well-balanced quid pro quos. You want to cut the budget, give us more time or expect fewer features. You want to tighten the schedule, give us more capital or reduce the scope of benefits. You want an industry defining product, show us the money or don’t ask for a date.

Surely these threads have become clichés, and as such, they are not without some underlying truth. There are even schools of thought that proclaim speed over accuracy is the game-winning formula, entire companies built on this premise, hugely successful in their own right. Yet when the Decision Maker, whoever that is, makes the call to greenlight a software or product release, another question comes to mind: Is the call transparent or opaque? Said another way, are the risks inherent in the release from staging to live known to the Decision Maker, or is that person flying blind?

If the release is going live with known issues, that becomes a business decision with acknowledged acceptable risk. If a showstopper issue exists but is unknown to anyone, well, I don’t think I have ever seen that case in a going concern. If the release is going live with issues known to others but not the Decision Maker, that is a dysfunctional process, possibly the beginning of the end.

Here is the way I like to think about quality in product development: Quality Assurance is a Process, not a Department.

Like so many of the great lessons I have co-opted in this blog, this first became clear to me in hard-won experience with the magnificent QA Directors with whom I have worked over the years (several of whom reviewed this post in draft prior to publication), and second in Jim McCarthy’s brilliant book Dynamics of Software Development first published in 1995 and still a must read for any of my teams—non-tech even more than tech staff. The most critical constant of which I am aware in delivering great products to market consistently is for Quality to be owned by everyone involved in innovation—from designers to developers to marketers to feedback from end-users.

Of course every great development company will have a final step in the process called Quality Control or Quality Assurance, but it is my sense that the QA formal group is there to be the standard-bearer for Quality and rally the company around it, putting a final go or no-go procedure in place before the world gets its hands on a product, but not accepting proxy status for an otherwise poor process. A QA department is not a dumping ground, not a remote server where code is parked as a step function or convenient checkpoint in a perfunctory release approval, not a cynical target of blame. QA is the proxy for the customer, not management, and as such must have a voice that is shared throughout a company. If a Decision Maker chooses not to listen to either the process or a warning from fully objective and independent QA stewards, you get what you get.

I have always been enamored with QA teams, for their passion, for what they teach me, for how much they care about excellence. When QA is wound into the culture of a company, it is often because of the mutual and shared respect an organization has for the value of Quality as an intrinsic good that will most likely yield extrinsic rewards, but carries reward for itself in the form of realized creativity and pride. It is very hard to fake a love of Quality, and this applies to much more than software. Quality is a path to premium brands cautionary tale and premium prices in a landscape where speed and disseminated knowledge can commoditize just about anything if you let it. Quality is won when it is broadly embraced as a shared value, and then championed by a high energy team that inspires its adoption at the highest levels of management and all through the ranks. If top management does not buy this, Quality is doomed.

If top management at BATS did not know about the bug in their system—a software platform for trading equities like their own on IPO day and beyond —they did not do the hard work that is expected of them and now accept the business consequences. The downside illustrated in this real world example of an incomplete process is about as clear as it can be. To ignore or be ignorant of a showstopper in one’s own product is a reflection of a process that needs to be re-engineered. When you’re working with world-class engineers, it is much easier and far more fruitful to make sure the process is engineered correctly before the products go through it. The material cost of discovering a bug early in development is a tiny fraction of what it can cost you in the hands of the public. Give your engineers a voice and they will save you every time.

Listen to your QA stewards. If you built the right team, they are your first line of offense and your last line of defense. They know of what you speak.