Defending against Entropy
Peter de Jager is a provocative Speaker, Writer and Consultant. His primary focus in on how we manage change, technology and the future.
In addition to speaking at conferences worldwide, he's also writen monthly columns for CIO Magazine and Computerworld Canada.
His goal is always to question what we think is so, and in so doing perhaps open up new opportunities.
If you'd like permission to reprint any of Peter's articles, please contact him directly.
You can contact him at
pdejager@technobility.com
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It is far easier to create a problem than it is to solve it, that’s why the guiding principle behind the Hippocratic Oath is “to do no harm”. No matter what we’re doing, but especially when we’re trying to solve a problem, we must always be on our guard against making things worse.
When we adopt this philosophy, which we could also describe as “Defending against the forces of entropy”, we’re often perceived by others as being “pessimistic”. Admittedly, this mindset requires that we’re always asking ourselves “What could possibly go wrong, and what can we do to avoid it?” But this is exactly the mindset that stops boats from sinking, planes from crashing, bridges from falling and our hopes for the future from going up in smoke.
I wish the two repairmen from my local Internet provider had adopted that pessimistic outlook on life yesterday. They came by to bury the cable which had been snaking across my lawn for the past few months. When they arrived, I was happily working on the Internet with no problems. When they left, I could no longer access the Internet.
24 hours later, I still don’t have access. Naturally they had to disconnect me from the internet for a few minutes after they had laid the new cable. Immediately after they “reconnected” the cable, they left. They made the assumption that everything was as it should be after they made their changes, it wasn’t. They did “harm” instead of doing “good”.
Adopting this way of defensive thinking is a little bit more difficult than it sounds. It requires preparation before every action. In order to know that we’re not making things worse by changing things, we must first know the current status. If we don’t do this, then there is no way to know if we’ve made a change for the better, because we can’t compare it to the way it was before. Of course, every decrease in entropy has a way of making itself known. Customers and clients have this annoying habit of letting us know when we’ve made things worse. I can assure you, my cable company was well aware I could no longer access the internet.
In the example I’ve been using with some frustrated relish, the current status before the cable was buried, was that I could access the internet, and our cable TV was working. Neither state is still true after the change.
To put this another way, problem solvers must pay attention to more than “What must I fix?” it must also pay equal attention to the question “What mustn’t I break while I’m trying to fix the thing that’s broken?”
That advice should be too obvious to mention, but we’ve caused hugely expensive mistakes by ignoring it; We introduce new species into an environment, which run rampant because there’s no natural predator to control their population; We merge organizations and consciously ignore the existence of radically different cultures; We make changes to our organizations and act as if the existing traditions of the status quo are of no value or importance. Then, when these efforts come crashing down, we act as if failure was inevitable, or claim that the blame lies with those affected by the upheaval and not with those who orchestrated the change.
There’s a simple solution to this problem, but it’s not an easy one,
it’s a two part solution;
1) Before making a change, examine the status quo and identify what
must stay the same.
In other words, what aspects of the status quo must we protect?
2) To the best of our ability (there are no guarantees in this, this is real advice, not hype)
consider the consequences of what we’re about to do in light of what we’ve discovered
in #1, and take appropriate steps to ensure that the worst doesn’t happen.
The difficulty we have in following this is that it takes time, and therefore
a high degree of discipline. We can’t wave a magic wand to do this, there’s no silver bullet which can do it for us,
we have to “do it” ourselves. That’s the difficult part, having the discipline to follow the obvious.
The two service fellows who came by to bury my cable had an incredibly simple solution to their service problem at their disposal. All they had to do was knock on the door before they left and ask a simple question, “We’ve made a change, can you still access the Internet?”
Here’s the scary part. There’s no process an organization can put in place to ensure that their people verify they’ve done no harm. The best they can do is stress the importance of making sure they “do no harm”, and the rest is up to the discipline of the doer to follow through.
© 2006, Peter de Jager. Peter is a management consultant who is sometimes puzzled by why we don’t do what we know we should do. You can share your stories with
him at
Pdejager@technobility.com
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