“There are times when we need to take off our blinkers and put on rose-coloured glasses.”
During a trip to the baseball hall of fame, the iconic American baseball player Yogi Berra said to his wife: “We’re completely lost, but we’re making good time.” And that’s exactly where we are in the IT industry today: completely lost but making good time.
There has never been a more exciting time to be in IT. We are making remarkable technological advances every day and the boundaries of IT are expanding into society and our daily lives at the speed
of light—the industry is metamorphosing into forms we’ve never seen before. Yet, the (perhaps naïve) bravado of the dot-com boom has been replaced with . . . nothing. Just an eerie silence.
Like survivors of a holocaust we plod around the IT landscape, shocked and emotionally numb.
A conspiracy of silence hangs like a cloud over any IT discussions. Predictions are sombre. Optimists and visionaries are treated like fools and heroes are made of those who are the most pessimistic.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and so management strategists have volunteered to fill the gap, claiming that we don’t need new ideas any more. “The information technology revolution happened long ago” they say, “it produced all the ideas that we need, and now we just have to focus on implementing them effectively”. Others describe all IT as a commodity. Of course we know this isn’t true: it doesn’t even make sense. New technologies and methods are being invented every day, and any early adopters that can harness them effectively will gain competitive advantage over their competitors. But, brow beaten and scarred, we dare not speak.
And in not speaking we do a great disservice to our industry. Predictions are thought experiments, and without experiments we can’t discover the truth. We’ve become pessimists, focussing on the present, bleak about the future, which is rather unfortunate because as Learned Optimism author Martin Seligman explains, optimists are happier, healthier and live longer than pessimists.
Traditionally, IT has attracted and rewarded pessimists. “They aren’t pessimists,” we say, “they’re realists.” And that’s true. We are charged with the responsibility of ensuring our systems are secure, reliable and robust; an optimistic attitude won’t deliver these attributes. Instead, it takes a pessimist to work out all the possible ways the system can be broken, and then redesign it so that it’s indestructible. Pessimism is a valued and time-honoured trait in our business.
However, there are times when we need to take off our blinkers and put on rose-coloured glasses. The approach used to create foolproof code and always-available systems is not the best way to explore current alternatives and future possibilities. Instead, like explorers of the past, we need to be optimistic. Exploration by its very nature is a risky business—there will be failures, and it is only by quickly recovering from these failures and continuing the journey of exploration that great discoveries are made. The roads to these discoveries are paved with the corpses of pessimists, the ones who gave up because they saw failure as permanent, personal and pervasive. Optimists, on the other hand, see failures as temporary, impersonal and local. This allows them to retain the will to keep on searching until they achieve success. No, optimists are not realistic (don’t give them a job in IT security). But if we want to explore new opportunities and create competitive advantage we either need to develop more optimism, or value and nurture the optimists we already have working with us. Only optimists and visionaries can take us beyond the familiar, to design systems that realise the full potential of new technologies.
Perhaps Steve Jobs’ motto of “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish” isn’t so foolish afterall. Some youthful optimism may be good for business, and good for the future.
Gerald Khoury consults, lectures and writes in IT strategy and planning.
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