Through Not Around: Transhuman Systems and Change, Part III

[This is part III of a piece that was originally a talk I gave at Nearform’s Microservices Day conference, to the confusion of all ;). I’m posting it here in 3 parts, and in full disheveled glory…]

Risk & Accountability

Another deterrent to organizational change is risk aversion. And deliberateness is also a feature of well-executed risk taking. However, this is not well understood or appreciated in enterprise cultures, that still repeat the myths of their heroic age.

This is a major topic, and really a topic for another day, but I want to mention it briefly.

I think we often misunderstand risk taking. It’s actually a tricky concept.

Often what looks like risk taking isn’t. Often, we will only attempt risky things if someone else tells us to, or if we can’t get anyone to tell us to, we will not attempt them. Hence, neglecting difficult, necessary things…

Often what doesn’t look like risk taking, is. Mitigating risk through hedging, creating options, or careful planning, is still risk taking, in fact the best kind.

I believe our current obsessions with risk taking and accountability are in conflict. The relation btw the two is complicated.

Insisting on accountability tries to concentrate the risk in one spot. But that’s a poor design choice — it’s like deliberately designing a single point of failure. With regard to risk taking, which is different from performance, accountability should be distributed.

Insisting on accountability also often feels like an attempt to make the determination of successful risk taking mechanical. But if failure is to be considered at times a successful outcome, because we learned something, judgment must be applied. There are good failures, and bad failures, and much subtlety btw them. If there is perfect clarity as to which is which, it isn’t really risk taking. Risk taking only occurs within the space of the unknown.

Last, when we talk about boldness,or a bias to action, or aggression, we often undermine true risk-taking. Too often, boldness is used as a screen, and sits within the same bag of tricks as deflection, credit seeking, or controlling the narrative. Good risk taking, and hence good failure, is calculated, distributed, and hedged.

But in corporate circles we often paint those activities as timid or weak. They can be — the difference is leadership. Perhaps once in a while, in extreme situations, you have to burn the boats. But most of the time, keep your boats. I raise this because I think it’s a serious, deep, and unresolved issue in corporate culture today, the consequences of which we see all the time.

Disgust

I am now going to contradict myself shamelessly.

I have said that changing people, their attitudes, beliefs, aspirations and ambitions — is a waste of time when trying to change an organization, and that changing structure is far more effective. And I think this is true — but people can be a powerful agent for changing structure. And disgust — abhorrence, repulsion, moral outrage — can be a powerful and underdeveloped agent for changing people.

Much has been made of the Toyota Production System, known simply as the Toyota Way, pioneered by Taichii Ohno. The centerpiece of TPS is the abhorrence of waste — in Japanese, Muda. Now to be clear, this is speculation, not history or research, but I suspect that part of the effectiveness of the TPS ideology was driven by the natural., cultural abhorrence of waste in Japan, particularly post-war Japan. As an island nation, Japan always struggled with limited resources, and particularly in the wake of the devastation of WW2, this was keenly felt in the culture. Ohno merely had to channel this natural, cultural abhorrence of waste, this powerful moral disgust, by associating the complex ways in which factories waste materials with the cultural image of waste. He had to make workers see factory waste as Muda, literally a horse carrying no load — and this “learning to see” was the active insight within his ideology, the moment of conversion.

Joi Ito of the MIT Media Lab has written recently about the harnessing of disgust to effect change in our attitudes about environmentalism. He wrote:

“I believe that transforming our culture so that having more than enough feels somewhat disgusting and art and culture reflect the diverse and complex systems in which we live will do more than any fiddling around.” And then he smashed a violin. Get it? I’m not going to smash anything though.

I have just started thinking about this. How can we harness the deep, visceral power of disgust to effect organizational change? In software, how can we make technical debt revolting? How can we make monolithic applications induce actual, physical nausea? How can we make shitty code as objectionable as actual excrement? If we can figure that out, change will be easy.

Through Not Around

Disgust may be the main impulse at the very root of culture, hence it’s incredible potential for transformation. Levi-Strauss wrote about the disgust of raw food driving acculturation in early man, and Freud wrote about the taboo against incest as a foundation of human social development as well.

Speaking of Freud, we asked the question earlier of what therapy might look like applied to a system, and by implication, to an organization. Freud’s ideas about the mind, and his inspiration for his analytical therapy, came from the study of hysteria, which he considered to be the effect of repressed memories or feelings working around the resistance of the superego, to burst forth as unexplained feelings or even actions. In a later essay, he described his approach to therapy as remembering, repeating and working through.

And so I finally get to the supposed subject of my talk. Hysteria for Freud was actually a strategy of the psyche to remain in stasis, to resist change — to preserve a balance, however dysfunctional, between the drives and the superego, generally at the expense of the ego. The way to unblock this stasis, and allow the psyche to change, in his view was to remember at least in part the repressed event, often through dreams, repeat the hysterical actions in the context of the patient-therapist transference, exposing it to analysis, and work through the process of change.

I believe this model holds for enterprises. As engineers, we are often tempted to route around what we see as the obstacle, the things that we think we can’t change or that we don’t want to deal with. But this plays into the strategy of the enterprise, as a transhuman entity, whose essence is to stay the same. I think that only by working through, often slowly, patiently, even painfully, almost undetectably, can we affect real change.

Is it worth it? Well, if you want to actually change the enterprise, I think it is. Do what it takes. The change is not an obstacle to, or detour from, the work, it is the work. The work exacts a toll. Confronting the toll takes courage. For that there is no substitute.