Empowerment. Bollocks.
- Semprini
- June 4, 2021
- 0
I must be getting too old for this shit dear reader, and my deteriorating brain must not be able to appreciate the magnificence that is modern corporate IT. Despite my galloping senility, I shall attempt to marshal my outdated thinking on why we often feel like hamsters in a wheel, destined to never actually get anywhere but with ever increasing demand to go faster.
"I have something much better than proof - anecdotal evidence." - Dogbert
Management seems to get satisfaction from calling themselves leadership without understanding what that actually means. Instead of being active leaders who drive a vision for moving the business forward, they "empower" everyone and hop onboard the train which gathers the right amount of steam to avoid making a decision or actively telling someone no.
I don't want total empowerment, I want leadership and inspiration. I want those leaders to actually understand the domain they seek to lead. Where would a hospital be if the chief medical officer had no/limited medical knowledge? Where would the military be if the commander did not fully understand what their orders would mean? In a legal practice, the most senior partners are skilled lawyers and the line management functions are a secondary concern. This structure has evolved for a reason - the people making the decisions have first hand and in-depth knowledge of the impact of their decisions on their staff and business.
IT management has become a void of IT knowledge, people chosen for their ability to string a series of buzzwords together rather than experts in the field they are "leading". Maybe it's the demand outstripping supply causing this for IT but there seems to be a race to the bottom of both cost and skill with layers of middle management trying to compensate.
Time for some psychology, some sociology and some neuroscience all loosely cobbled together into an argument for changing the balance of leadership versus empowerment.
Humans like all pack/social animals like freedom within limits, our brains are happy and not stressed when we understand and are comfortable with the bounds of our remit. We thrive when we have the right amount of freedom and individualism. For example, studies done on race car drivers unexpectedly found that the brain becomes quieter during a race, when the amount of input is highest. The drivers brain knows exactly what is expected and can therefore concentrate on limited permutations.
Noam Chompsky discusses how we are biological creatures, and just as our eyes have evolved, our morals and self identity have too. So while we like to think we have complete free will, in actuality we choose between, and enjoy having a narrow set of behaviours due to how we have evolved.
A common indicator of maturity is the ability to accept delayed gratification and work for longer term benefit for society or the family group. In IT, this longer term view for the business has been outweighed by narrow personal goals which encourage short term "low hanging fruit" thinking which can be advertised as success and look good in a CV but actually harms the longer term outlook for the business.
Adopting a more strategic approach does not mean getting rid of the ubiquitous and often useful methodologies like Agile or MVP but does put more importance on not architecting ourselves into a corner during design and prioritisation. I.e. sympathetic treatment of people, process and technology. A key skill to help here is for an architect is to develop the ability to swim in the ambiguity of business wants and needs but this is made much more difficult with unclear roles and expectations.
It feels that stakeholders of IT services are so used to failed projects that no one bats an eyelid any more and management lacks the knowledge to understand why things fail. Since no one understands IT failure we implement methodology which desperately tries to manipulate people into a consensus view and implied responsibility. Consensus is another tool to mitigate responsibility, and at this part in proceedings, I recommend an audiovisual interlude to watch David Mitchell's rant on consensus. Mr Mitchell and I differ here on one important point, in that an architect takes personal responsibility for the IT outcomes for the business.
In summary, it's freedom within a framework which provides the most satisfaction. We should be empowered to do our jobs - not any job or our bosses job. With unclear roles comes unclear goals and therefore unhappy people and underperforming business. To achieve this balance a leader needs to have enough talent within their domain to have a clear vision of what could be, call bullshit when required and understand the impact of decisions through the stack. R.M. Bastien discusses the result of this lack of management understanding as a 'Complexity Factory' here: https://rmbastien.com/factory
