Wisdom Where You Find It

Peter de Jager is a provocative Speaker, Writer and Consultant. His primary focus is on how we manage change, technology and the future.

In addition to speaking at conferences worldwide, he also writes more than a dozen monthly columns a IDG Computerworld Syndication, ABA Bankers Journal, CIPS Across Canada, Voyageur (an SF magazine) and a handful of others.

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

We speak about the 'Learning Organization' without ever really giving hard examples of what we mean. In my mind, I've always envisioned an organization filled with people who work with their eyes glued open and their ability to question the world around them, permanently engaged.

Do such people exist? I've proof they exist in abundance... While stuck behind a writer's block searching for some way to get the creative juices flowing, I posed a question to an online discussion group. Describe a learning experience in your IT career, which for you was a blinding revelation... something that really opened your eyes to how technology affects us... 

I did not really know what to expect, since I don't really know any of the participants in this group, but there was little to lose. I received back about 15 responses, and they're good examples of what I had in mind. Each of them demonstrated the value of introspection. Sometimes the value was purely personal, other times it was a lesson learnt which delivered corporate benefit.

Perhaps asking a similar question each week in our sometimes boring meetings would make the concept of the 'Learning organization' more of a reality and less of a consultant's pipe dream.

For the purposes of this article, I've trimmed each anecdote to less than 200 words (with a few exceptions) and identified the learning with italics. I've also, as a way to contribute my thoughts to this collaboration I've made the great presumption of summarizing my spin on these lessons into pithy quotes. I make no claim that my learning coincided with what the submitter intended.

All the mistakes are mine, all the wisdom theirs.

1 - Submitted by: Yours truly.
Years ago I hired a summer co-op student. At the time my mandate was to introduce PCs into our organization.

We had just received the first IRMA board (a 3270 emulator) and I handed this to the student to install. He came back frustrated... having no luck getting it to work... He demanded I send him to a course to learn how to do this, that it was unfair to expect him to install this without training.

This hit me like a ton of bricks. It encapsulated 'Future Shock' for me... there was a realization that all technologists are in fact explorers... there are no courses, no training, no manuals for new technologies...

From that day forward I never again looked at technical achievements when hiring... what I was interested in was ability, courage... even arrogance when it came to technology. I didn't want people who had 'done it', I wanted people who were not afraid of 'trying to do it'... not afraid of failure, not afraid of ignorance, nor of incompetence.

Learning: When you step into the future, you're the only leader you can follow

2 - Submitted by: Amy J. Chetelat
In the mid 1980s we were getting ready to upgrade an IBM System 34 to the System 36. We planned to receive and install the '36 over a weekend (since we had to recompile every program). IBM delivered the equipment early. Not three hours after the new equipment was delivered the System 34 literally blew up. The hard drives and part of the memory died and even IBM couldn't revive it. We had to do an emergency install of the new computer and spent the next 23 hours recompiling all the programs necessary to run our payroll (naturally the software to automatically recompile everything didn't show up) so we could pay all our employees the next morning. Thank heavens we had good backups.

That experience taught me first hand about just how important having a disaster recovery plan in place is. We had about 250 employees that would not have understood if we couldn't have paid them on time. It also taught me first hand how imperative it is go have good backups. I'm probably fanatical about it now.

Learning: Backups don't just save data, they save time, effort and work


3 - Submitted by: Antony Chan
I first downloaded and use the Mosaic browser (for Win3.1?) from the NCSA at University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign. I believe it was late 1993. At that time I marvelled not only at the hyper-linked document concept but also the fact that I was able to access documents from different hardware and operating system platforms without setting up special software/drivers/interfaces. 

Some of you certainly would still remember those days when we have to set-up gateways to let one system "talk" to another. And the kind of troubles we have had to go through to access files and applications from another system? Now it's all transparent. The World Wide Web breakthrough allowed us to have this information explosion and changed the way we learn, search for information and do business.

Learning: Changing the speed of access, changes everything

4 - Submitted by: Bart Posselt
In 1991 I was writing a paper for a class in college. I was using one of the computer labs, and I stumbled across gopher and telnet. In one session I poked around in an Austrian university, a library in Tel Aviv, and downloaded Chief Seattle's famous speech from 1854 from someplace in Washington state. At the time I thought about how cool it would be if every book ever made was digitized and available through gopher. 

I guess it was a good idea: http://gutenberg.net http://www.wikipedia.org

Learning: If it's cool to you, it's cool to others too

5 - Submitted by: Doug Compton
I had one of my users say to me "the computer should work like the light switch, turn it on and it works". My first reaction was she needed an expectation adjustment. But the more I noodled on it the more I realized there is something to her comment. 

Computing technology (and most technology for that matter) has gotten very complicated for the normal person. In a rush to add just one more feature, manufacturers have made technology complicated. And there are too many choices. There are too many ways to do the same thing. Just think about printing an email. I can click on a print icon. I can do File..Print. I can do keystrokes of Ctrl+P. Sometimes choice is confusing. With a light switch it is 'on' or 'off'. Not many choices (ok, you can throw in a dimmer switch just to confuse someone). But the A-ha I got out of this was try to find ways to limit choices and in turn make technology easier.

Learning: Simplicity is a measure of usability.

6 - Submitted by: Doug Compton
In December we outsourced our first line help desk support. What this means is, my user, who previously would call an internal person and say "come fix", now has to call an 800# and spend time on the phone with a support person. 

What I have found (here's the A-ha) is that users do not want to take responsibility for fixing their own problem. In the "before outsourcing" world, a user could explain their problem to the person in their office and then walk away while the IT tech attempted to solve the issue. Now, in the "after outsourcing" world they must stay engaged in order to have the problem solved. This has been very interesting because the end user is no longer able to say "Now it is YOUR (Mr. IT) problem".

Learning: What's good for the goose, is seldom good for the gander

7 - Submitted by: Ken Hollemon
My (then) 82 year-old father kept church, radio club, and personal records on an Apple IIe and was immensely proud of this reduced his workload 

I convinced him he should upgrade and he bought a P386 with Windows 98. It had a mouse, color monitor, and other useful applications. He could even access the Internet and use e-mail. I thought I was bringing him up to today's computing world (relatively speaking). 

Ha!! When you're 86 years old, it's hard to manoeuvre a mouse. The desktop icons we take for granted are not intuitively obvious. Walking him through changes in the Control Panel is an hour of frustrating step-by-step coaching. The Internet is so vast it's intimidating, especially when the ISP kicks him off because of inactivity. What seems simple in our paradigm is really hard in that paradigm. I really impress him when I visit and I fly through reconfigurations, setting up a contact data base, or building folders for his e-mail. But as soon as I leave, that effort is wasted because it can't be used by the intended beneficiary.

Learning: Usability is more important than potential

8 - Submitted by: Paul Rushizky
A few months ago, I heard the news that one my nephews had a 'Chiari malformation,' where part of the skull is restricting blood flow to the brain, resulting in symptoms not unlike, say, cystic fibrosis. They decided they'd need to do a couple of surgeries to correct the issue, one of which had never been performed on a person so young (he's 4).

My brother-in-law set up a blog (short for Web-Log), and used this to educate friends and family on what was going on. He would post updates on when the surgery was scheduled, how my nephew was doing, even links to explanations of the surgery and pictures from inside his son's brain.

As the biggest surgery proceeded, my brother-in-law was posting to the blog from his Blackberry as he sat in the waiting room. I'm happy to say that the surgeries were a success, and my nephew is well on his way to recovery.

Like a lot of you, I'm fairly jaded about new developments in technology. But this one really hit home, as a very personal use of technology that could keep dozens of people up-to-date and informed on the process. 

Learning: Technological power no longer belongs only to the rich and powerful

9 - Submitted by: Shelly Good-Cook
In the late 1980's when I realized I could use a word processor for typing papers, and the amazing way I could stretch the number of pages by shrinking the margins!

Learning: Technology always finds unintended usage

10 - Submitted by: Shelly Good-Cook
Last year my 75 year old father completely astounded me by saying "I'm thinking about buying a computer". I couldn't imagine why he wanted a computer since he finds the telephone to be an annoyance, and didn't get a microwave until a few years ago. 

It turned out that all of his former CB radio buddies are now online and he was missing out on the email action. My twin sister and I spent many frustrating hours teaching him the basics we all take for granted, such as how to double-click, but he was eager to learn and has mastered the art of receiving and forwarding jokes to his buddies.

Learning: We will embrace any change, if we decide we want to

11 - Submitted by: Vince Streiff
I got a programmable calculator in high school. I played around with it, got comfortable with it, and used it in math class. When it was time for a big test (for which calculators were allowed), there was a bit of a fuss -- students argued it wasn't fair for those of us with programmable calculators to use them, since we could just plug in the numbers and get the answers. The teacher took their side, and indicated those of us without "normal" calculators would have to take the test without any calculator at all. 

I pointed out that they were 'programmable', not pre-programmed -- to get accurate answers, I had to understand the math well enough to program it in -- a depth of understanding probably not required of those with "normal" calculators -- and if I didn't have it right, then my answers would be wrong.

The main thing I learned from that was people make a lot of false assumptions about technology's ability to do things for us. I still had to know how to do things; my calculator didn't "know" the answers - but it appeared that way to people who only saw the end result.

Learning: It takes work, and knowledge, to use a lever effectively

12 - Submitted by: TJ Rainsford
We were called into an organization with an email system that had just blown up. In an attempt to upgrade a system, we encountered a problem. We had an unstable file server, a non-existent email system, and 100 VERY unhappy users. 

We spent quite a number of hours talking with the Vendor and running restore after restore. At about 11:00PM that night, my boss and I thought we had a solution to the problem. Unfortunately, the Vendor told us it wouldn't work. Well, taking a never say die attitude (and accepting the sleep deprivation), we opted to try our solution anyway. The email system came back to life...despite what they told us (of course, the blessing we gave the file server before we restarted may have helped!). When staff arrived the next morning, everything was back to normal.

Moral of the story: Technology is more Art than Science! We broke the supposed rules and the thing still worked! Ever since, I take an "outside the box" mentality to implementation and problem solving. 

And another lesson learned: Very few of the employees said as much as "thank you" when the system came back online. Users will often complain (quite loudly at times) when things don't work but think nothing of it when things work as they are suppose to despite the effort you have taken to keep things running. Don't expect praise from the masses but take pride in your success and achievements! In the end, it only matters if YOU know what you achieved.

Learning: Most success is personally driven and its own reward

13 - Submitted by: Tom Noland
My sister graduated - Magna Cum Laude - as a math major. She got a great job, working for General Dynamics in San Diego - she was the director of the work group in charge of their internal CRAY computer systems - the 2nd fastest computer on the planet at that time. GD was doing a great deal of work on the Star Wars project - locating objects in space - in 3 dimensions - in less then a second. 

Well life moved on, her husband enlisted in the Army, she retired to raise a family and hasn't worked since. Years later I was scheduling a trip to go visit her and her growing family. I suggested I could fax her the itinerary. She replied "What's a fax machine?" and "You mean you can send a document over phone lines?"

In a period of about four years she had gone from the extreme sharp-edge of technology, to not knowing what a fax machine was. At that moment I decided to always be 'reading-ahead' about technology - so I'll always at least know what the next fax machine is.

Learning: If nothing else, your reading speed should match the speed of change

14 - Submitted by: David Carleton
I remember being amazed at the level of personal technology (even if only cell phones) during the collapse of the Soviet Union, and even at Tiananmen square. The liberating power of instant global communications has had a profound effect on society and politics. (Did anyone else follow the blogger in Baghdad during the US invasion?)

Now our own home-grown "powers-that-be" are afraid of this same freedom of communication, and the power of shared information. Note the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, UCITA, and the Patriot Act, plus other sundry efforts to monitor net communications in this county.

Now that IT isn't just the province of "tech-nerds", and has become increasingly mainstream and is forming a new national/global infrastructure, how are WE going to influence the inevitable regulation or monitoring of this brave new world?

Learning: As the power of technology increases it becomes accessible by individuals

15 - Submitted by: Terri Haffner
I lived in a third world country for two years. When I left, my company was still using DOS. 8 meg of RAM and a 100 meg hard drive were top of the line. When I returned, everyone was using Windows, floppy disks had gone from 5 1/4 to 3 1/2 size, everyone suddenly had e-mail addresses and the Internet had come into common use. 

To top it all off, Object oriented programming had become the norm. All of this happened in the two years that I was gone. What did I learn? Technology tends to change faster than the speed of light. I need to always be willing to change and to learn -- quickly!

Learning: The speed of change has become visible, allowing those with open eyes time to react

16 - Submitted by: Mike Guerrieri
I was managing a MicroVAX in the late 80's and it had a disk drive failure and it idled about 60 employees. A technician showed up for the repair pretty quickly. I was anxious about getting the system back up but he was very calm. At one point, he was having some trouble installing the new drive and he said, "Well, time to take a break." I responded with noticeable surprise. The tech then told me that he could continue working but he was not going to be as effective if he was frustrated so he learned that to walk away from the problem did wonders to solve it. 

Sure enough, he came back from a 5 minute break (I was still skeptical with this approach, it felt like a LONG time), he immediately got the drive installed. I've used this approach in several stressful situations and it has worked every time.

Lessons:
-Knowing when to take a break from pounding your head against the wall can be the fastest route to solving the problem (and prevent unnecessary damage to the wall)
-Being cool under pressure is a virtue in this field. 

Inadvertently, Mike gave us the perfect learning with which to end this little exercise...

Learning: A few minutes of thought, outweigh hours of frustration.
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© 2003, Peter de Jager - Peter is a Futurist, Speaker and Writer, contact him at pdejager@technobility.com or visit him at www.technobility.com.