A decade ago, Rob wrote about “Slow IT” and “Slow Business”. It is as relevant today as then.
The world is getting faster and faster: life, work, information, progress… they are all accelerating. There are counter-movements to try to restore some serenity.
Slow Work is our provocative name. It doesn’t mean staff on a go-slow. It means slowing down the pace of business demands so as to focus better on what matters, and to reduce the risk to what already exists. The intent of Slow Work is to allow staff to deliver important results more quickly. It does this by concentrating on the interfaces between business executives and management. Slow Work highlights the importance of governance and portfolios in order to make the right decisions to do the right things in the right way at the right time, to maximise benefit and minimise risk. Slow Work challenges the hysterias and fads of our time (e.g. “Digital Transformation”, and of course AI) to ensure that these results are really needed as quickly as you think they are. Slow Work is about trying to introduce more measured responses, to bring some sanity to the current dangerous madness that is the organisational workload.
More crudely, calm the fuck down.
We had Slow Food decades ago. We were seeing Slow Business in the Twenty-Teens, and we hope we can revive Slow Work. We’re appealing for it here now.
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The key point we want to make is that there are absolute limits on how fast work can go, regardless of how fast the organisation may want it to go.
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Just because the technology is changing that fast doesn’t mean you have to, or can. The governors or executive or customers or users can rant all they want about how workers “must” deliver faster, but they are approaching rates that simply are not humanly possible. The limits are with humans and systems: there appear to be no technical asymptotes… yet.
Yes, AI accelerates the rate you can get work done, and yes, Open ways of managing and working unlock even more latent productivity and accelerate workflows, but that only relieves the constraint not removes it.
You don’t have to slow the pace of change – it will find its own natural limits. In some cases you may choose to slow up – for safety, for sanity. It may not be good for you – as individuals or as an organisation – to be banging into those limits. In other cases, reality slows you up whether you like it or not.
The onus is on the organisation and the customer to understand (or at least listen to) the limits of work, and to manage that risk responsibly. It’s not happening much. They must understand that relentlessly driving the system only overloads it, thereby reducing the throughput, resilience, and agility. Only by easing up can you create the headroom to improve how you work, relieving the constraints on it.
Madness
There is a sense of urgency everywhere, bordering on panic or hysteria. The panic is based on hype, overselling from vendors and analysts, and hysteria induced by rapid tech change. It is good for selling software, services, and analysts. Not so good for the organisations that rush into bad decisions, and drive their systems to collapse.
We as a society are fixated with the fast times and fast money of the high-tech poster-child companies. Some of these “fizzy” tech companies are starting to slow down, or gone completely into corporate mode. But much of the rest of society never sped up to the same degree in the first place. The investment and banking sectors did, and brought us the Global Financial Crisis as a result. Read Boomerang: the Meltdown Tour as an entertaining chronicle of the pinnacles of stupidity in the GFC (and more chillingly about how it’s not over yet). But other sectors like, say, manufacturing, shipping, primary industries, construction, or landscaping didn’t. Retailing and publishing have been revolutionised by online selling, true. But when you look at the manufacturing sector, many of the ones who rushed into e-commerce, or to outsource overseas, are regretting it now while many companies just keep making good stuff and making a living. Service industries, tradespeople, small businesses in their millions watch all the fuss with bemusement, or they waste a month’s profits on a bad website they don’t need. Many of you reading this need to recalibrate: if you spend all your days talking to Fortune 1000 companies (or Silicon Valley start-ups) you are going to get a “Swiss bank account” view of the world. That’s what we call the illusion created from only talking to a limited subset of the world.
Him: Everybody needs a Swiss bank account.
Me: No they don’t.
Him: Of course they do. It is the only sensible effective place to keep your spare liquid cash.
Me: Since 2009 I don’t have any spare cash.
Him: it doesn’t need to be large amounts. Anything over a million should be put offshore.
Me: I’ve never had a million. Right now I don’t even have a thousand dollars spare.
Him: You don’t? how dreadful for you. But that doesn’t affect my point.
Me: Most people don’t have a spare million lying around
Him: Sure they do. Everyone I talk to does. And I consult widely.
Me: Perhaps everyone who can afford you does. But trust me, most of the human race doesn’t.
Him: How extraordinary. Well certainly everyone who matters does. Everyone who cares about Swiss bank accounts, for example.
There is a rising hysteria. Pundits clamour for your attention forecasting revolution and disaster and singularities. You are told you must {{insert latest fad here}} or die. Apparently we are dinosaurs, doomed by technology asteroids. Tell that to stromatolites.
It seems to me that the USA is particularly infected with this demented pursuit of speed, with a fixation on quarterly earnings and the short-term fluctuations in share price and market share. But it is spreading everywhere. You can’t keep whipping yourselves into this frenzy: something has to pop. The whole world should hang its head in shame at the irrational exuberance that preceded the GFC, with Iceland the case study in normally sober people turning stupid with greed and speed.
The most popular whip with which to slash the flanks of the panting horse is competitive pressure: the race to adopt and innovate ahead of competitors and startups as if it were the only factor in successful business. This thinking comes – we think – from people trying to model business by projecting their own personal consumer experience onto it. The whole world isn’t Apple or Amazon; not all products behave like Google or Android; and operating your personal computing environment bears no resemblance to the conduct of commercial IT.
There are other ways to compete besides desperately aping a newcomer or scrabbling after the latest techno-fad. There are whole sectors of industry that are not driven by the latest consumer fads and the fickle loyalty of retail customers. Just as the business of IT should be conducted in a calm and thoughtful manner at a moderated pace, so too most customers are businesses, and they demand and respond at a similarly sensible speed.
The number of companies that are truly facing a tectonic shift in their market is very small compared to how many companies there are where people play the competition card. Sure transformation and revolution are all very exciting but they are not the norm. Most of the time when a competitor is closing on you it is because they have managed to improve some boring capability by 5%, or that they just got lucky for a bit. Next year it could all be different.
A soberly run corporation responds to the competitive environment with strategy and power, not haste and panic. Good managers play the long game and good governors give them the space to do so.
If you call yourself a business person, for pity’s sake calm down.
Slow IT
Too many people are imposing their personal technology experience onto expectations of corporate work. Just because you can load yourself down with trinkets and geegaws,; just because you can patch together a personal virtual environment in (un-valued) days; just because the consumer tech industry panders to your every whim unconstrained by issues like ROI; just because you live in a tech nirvana right now… none of this should not colour your views of how corporate IT works. They bear as much resemblance to each other as your backyard lawn does to the grain-farming industry. Let’s not project our personal consumer experience onto business, and let’s not treat every organisation as if it were in a commodity consumer retail market. It seems to me organisations are becoming unsophisticated in their understanding of business priorities, strategies and risks. Business is not the same as selling on the street, unless you sell on the street.
Talk of “transformational technologies” is a small view, lacking proper perspective of all aspects of the organisation. The change madness is getting worse with every passing year. The demands for change being placed on corporate IT are plain ridiculous. As a consequence, they are breaking work. In pursuit of absurd project commitments, they are eating their future.
And the hysteria reaches fever pitch as people extrapolate trends into the future linearly or – worse still – exponentially. This extrapolation is such bad thinking that it shouldn’t be worthy of debate, but the power of critical thought is a scarce resource these days because nobody has time to think any more.
This frantic scramble for an ever-accelerating rate of change has its epicentre in IT. Here it runs smack into two unyielding realities:
1) Contemporary corporate IT is a huge edifice, a fragile house of cards that nevertheless runs the business. What tiny start-ups blowing other people’s money can achieve, or web developers deliver by slapping lipstick on the corporate pig, is only mildly interesting in the big-iron worlds where we work. In legacy systems you must take care, proceed with caution. How many ERP or CRM rollouts do you need in order to prove that.
2) You can change hardware in seconds, software in days, processes in weeks. But people and cultures change at a human rate of change, and all the leaping and screaming – and cool toys – in the world aren’t gong to accelerate that pace much. In fact, the harder you push, the more the culture pushes back, like a water buffalo. Put another way, you can whip the horse all you want but it has a top speed.
The business makes these kinds of decisions in ignorance of IT. It is bad governance and bad management. It is not enough to say “IT just have to do it”. Often they can’t. They just can’t. Not in three months or three years. In which case, we challenge the assumption that reinvention is the correct business strategy. People can’t reorg that fast: the idea that Barnes and Noble could adopt an Amazon culture and practices within 3 years is the kind of management silliness that got us all into the Global Financial Crisis in the first place.
Many knowledge workers can PRETEND to and APPEAR to change, because everything is in heads and on paper: the evidence of practices can be changed quickly. (The reality of the underlying culture and the genuine behaviours is another matter – people only pretend to change quickly). However, IT can’t pretend. Systems and data have to really change. And corporate IT can’t change that quickly. The legacy investment is too huge and too complex to unpick in weeks or months, or even a couple of years. If the organisation managed and governed IT properly, it would understand this. For most organisations, IT is the whole ship not merely one of the sails. It enables the whole business: breaking IT will break the business. Therefore business needs to understand it properly and assess the implications realistically. The governors (the Board of Directors) have a moral and legal obligation to understand what they are asking for (see Sarbanes Oxley, Basel II, ISO38500 etc…). But too often the governors and executive managers don’t know their obligations, don’t understand IT, and refuse to listen. They decree and IT is expected to deliver.
Even if IT can change that quickly – if by some miracle it has a good enterprise architecture that the business hasn’t screwed in the past with bad governance decisions like this one – the cost of such change is immense. The business underestimates the cost and refuses to hear reason, and IT ends up eating BAU (Business As Usual – their existing operational systems) alive trying to resource an absurd level of under-funded projects chasing unreasonable deadlines.
In the pursuit of speed, an army of “can-do” consultants feast at the to-be-corpse of the the organisation, while it builds the technology debt that will one day kill it by wrecking its clean architecture with desperate make-do compromises to meet the competitive scramble. The Big-C consultancies create change by bulldozing systemic and cultural debt ahead of them, piling it up into the future after they’re gone.
No, the answer is NOT to radically change the way the whole IT industry works, or your IT organisation works, or even to change how you personally work. You won’t. You can’t. It doesn’t. You can’t ask for 30 hours in a day as a solution to the problem. Individuals change in months or years. Organisations change in years. Communities change in decades, if not generations (and no sonny I have no plans to retire for 20 years yet).
Frankly, this hysteria is adolescent, if not downright infantile. Work is 1% innovation and 99% perspiration. Innovation is not your day job. For the small number of people who are in charge of conceptualising new services or setting architectural directions, then novelty is very exciting. In some cases it is even relevant to them. For the rest of you, get back to work and stop looking over on that far horizon just because it looks cool – you have a business to run.
You’re an undisciplined rabble of kids who run out the gate to dance shrieking around anything shiny or noisy that comes along the road. If cool stuff is coming to you , the CIO and architects and designers will let you know soon enough. If you wanted to play with the cool toys you should have studied harder in school.
IT exists to protect and serve. There seems to be this expectation that IT exists only to create new work in response to the demands of the business. It’s not true. The Finance department doesn’t exist solely to find the money for whatever the business needs (“serve”). The Finance department also exists to look after the health and safety of the organisation’s wealth (“protect”). Sometimes the Finance department will resist new initiatives simply because the organisation can’t afford them. This then becomes a decision escalated to the Executive or the governors (the Board) to decide whether to proceed against the advice of the CFO who is protecting the organisation. In exactly the same way, the Information Technology department exists to protect the IT interests of the owners of the organisation whilst also serving IT’s customers and users. The two don’t always align. IT is entrusted with custody – protection – of the organisation’s IT assets. These include:
– the information itself: its confidentiality, integrity and availability
– the investment in existing systems to manage, support and use that information (people, – processes, hardware, software, connectivity, suppliers…)
– the capability to deploy new or changed systems: architecture, analysis, design, development, deployment
Large enterprises may never be able to do one hundred deploys a day like Amazon, but they probably don’t need to anyway. There is no reason why they can’t tune their ITIL processes to get to the point of delivering daily. They also may decide that certain applications fit a high-risk profile and are not allowed to be released every day. After all, not all applications are web apps. Use a hammer when you have nails; use a screwdriver when you have screws. Tighten controls when the applications are high risk; loosen the controls when they are not. – Mike Kohn (quote no longer online)
The solution for IT is to liberate the work to unleash productivity; evolve processes and systems towards resilience and agility; and – most of all for this topic – manage the flow of work, mostly through portfolio management and demand management – existing disciplines that are well understood within IT. Go find out. (BTW, liberation, adaptability, and flow are the three principles of our Open IT body of knowledge. There’s your solution.)
Slow Work
There was talk of Slow Business back in about 2012, such as this quote (which is no longer on the Economist website):
Google—whose chairman, Eric Schmidt, famously said, “We don’t have a two year-plan. We (only) have a next week plan.”—now offers “mindfulness development” classes to all its employees so they can cultivate patience over speed and favour reflection over reactivity at work…
C-level executives from Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are speaking about the importance of… slowing down, at the Wisdom 2.0 summit in San Francisco. This sold-out annual conference, in which the Who’s who’s Who who of the tech industry mingle with Buddhist meditation gurus, extolls the virtues of “mindfulness” and “introspection” and the importance of finding meaning in our technology-dominated, rapid-paced lives.
Warren Buffett famously described his investing strategy as “lethargy bordering on sloth“.
With the idea of Slow Work, we are saying can everyone just calm down a bit and let a little reason, considered reflection, and – *gasp* – actual testing and proof trickle into our strategy and planning. You need to understand how quickly that individuals can absorb change, and just as importantly how fast organisations can change their strategy, structure, process, and practices.
Most of all you must deal with the risks. Part of the dizzy rush for change in recent decades has been fueled by an abdication of responsibility for risk, disguised as mitigation of risk. What really goes on is that risks are noted, recorded, and somehow “managed”, then ignored. The finance industry has proved that you can’t hedge risk, not for ever and certainly not on a systemic scale. Ask the insurance companies about Kyoto or Christchurch, and how well the risk management worked there. Managing risk does not make higher risk safer. It makes you safer, period. Increased safety isn’t a reason for Formula One drivers to drive faster – it is a reason for less of them to die.
We are not resistant to change. We are not saying don’t change. What we are saying is that the employees, their customers, and their governors need to be realistic about human rates of change, and cognisant of the risks of excessive rates of change. There is a real limit to how fast humans can change: how fast you can change your behaviours, attitudes, processes, and systems. You need to accept that the technology is changing faster than society, your IT sector, your organisations, your teams, yourselves can change. In 2012 we were all standing in the ruins of an economy that embraced fast change. There are real risks to the pace of change, and we currently live in a culture that thinks writing risks down means you can then ignore them, or that if you can’t ignore them you can always hedge them somehow.
Speed is a good servant but a bad master – Adrian Wooldridge, The Economist
[We excessively] “concentrate on the destinations towards which change carries us, rather than the speed of the journey… The rate of change has implications quite apart form, and sometimes more important than, the directions of change… Any attempt to define the ‘content’ of change must include the consequences of pace itself as part of that content. – Alvin Toffler, Future Shock
Practically, you need a more sophisticated understanding of where your organisation needs velocity and where it needs calm. Simon Wardley’s mapping technique, and his concept of pioneers, settlers, and town planners are useful here, as in this quote:
the map of a business contains many components organised into a chain of needs (the value chain) with the components at differing states of evolution. As components evolve, their properties change (from uncharted to industrialised) and different methods of management become appropriate. Hence components in the uncharted space use in-house, agile techniques, quick release cycles, highly iterative etc. Whereas those more industrialised components tend to be six sigma, ITIL, long release cycles, heavily standardised etc.
When it comes to organising then each component not only needs different aptitudes (e.g. engineering + design) but also different attitudes (i.e. engineering in genesis is not the same as engineering in industrialised). To solve this, you end up implementing a trimodal structure known as pioneers, settlers and town planners…
The problem with bimodal (e.g. pioneers and town planners) is it lacks the middle component (the settlers) which performs an essential function in ensuring that work is taken from the pioneers and turned into mature products before the town planners can turn this into industrialised commodities or utility services. Without this middle component then yes you cover the two extremes (e.g. agile vs six sigma) but new things built never progress or evolve. You have nothing managing the ‘flow’ from one extreme to another.
There is some social and business backlash already to the pace of change. We all have to slow down a bit. Perhaps “Slow Work” is the wrong name but it was catchy. We are not saying go slooooow. The world has somehow sustained a pretty impressive pace for decades. But clearly it can’t go much faster, if at all, and all these demands that it must go faster are plain silly. It just can’t. There’s bits falling off, people burning out, smoking shells of projects everywhere. Ease off a little, calm down, stop panicking, stop this desperate headlong rush. Mindfulness is a key element: we all need time to think. Let the world keep up.