Making IT Live up to its Promise
If you’re not completely happy with your life, read a book. There are literally thousands of books with important tips and techniques you can use immediately to improve your life.
I’m currently reading “The Obstacle is the Way” by Ryan Holiday, and I have a long list of books to read. Celebrate World Book Day today by picking up a book. It just might change your life.
Beneficial Intelligence is out. This week: Irrational optimism. IT people are too optimistic about schedules and business cases. It is a natural consequence of our ability to build something from nothing. As a CIO or CTO, you need to make sure you have some pragmatic pessimists to point out the things that might go wrong. Because IT is too optimistic and Legal & Compliance is too cautious, IT organizations often turn to outsiders like me.
Listen here or find “Beneficial Intelligence” wherever you get your podcasts.
Because the IT industry has failed to agree on any meaningful guidelines for AI usage, regulators are now stepping in. In order to get the attention of the global giants, the proposed EU regulation is threatening with GDPR-style fines of up to 6% of global sales. The rules outlaw some usage, like real-time facial recognition, and place strict limits on other uses. For “high-risk” use by police and courts, companies must provide risk assessment and documentation of how the system comes to its recommendations.
In the US, the Federal Trade Commission has also just weighed in. In a blog post, they clarified that selling or using biased AI might constitute “unfair or deceptive practice” and be subject to fines.
As a CIO or CTO, check who is responsible for ensuring your AI projects adhere to all relevant regulations. Each individual project cannot be responsible for keeping up with rapidly developing global regulations. If you have not appointed someone to keep watch over your AI project, the blame will end on your desk when your organization is found to violate AI regulations you weren’t even aware of.
Do you always play it safe? We all have our personal risk profiles. Some people climb mountains without safety ropes, while others won’t climb more than two steps up a ladder. Being very careful to follow all the recommendations might be a good strategy in a pandemic, but being over-cautious also means you miss out on opportunities.
Researchers in the UK have found that teaching children chess made them more willing to take prudent risks. In chess, you need to be able to take prudent risks and sacrifice a piece to gain a decisive advantage. Chess was a safe environment for the children to experiment with risk – the worst thing that could happen was that they lost the game.
If you are being over-cautious in your life, find some place where you can practice taking small risks. You might even take up chess.
Do you track your sleep? New research from the UK has added dementia to the long list of diseases and health problems associated with too little sleep. After controlling for many other factors, they found that 50-year-olds who slept six hours or less per night had a 22% increased risk of developing dementia. For 60-year-olds, the risk went up by 37%.
Keep track of your sleep for a few weeks to get an idea of whether you are sleeping enough. The Apple Watch and many other smart watches will register your sleep. You can also get a sensor to place under your mattress or even a Google Nest with radar to track your movement during the night. But even without a device, you can simply write down when you started your evening wind-down, when you went to bed and when you got up. Spending some time winding down (without devices or TV) and spending enough time in bed is the first step towards better sleep.
If you don’t get enough sleep, it is very hard to improve your life.
When you work from home, you can create your own sound. You are free from the hellish soundscape of the open-plan office, so you don’t have to wear your noise-cancelling headphones. Since you probably don’t live in the countryside where you only heard birdsong and the buzzing of bees, you will have to create your own sound landscape.
You might have traffic noise, neighbors, barking dogs, and maybe even our partner speaking too loudly on a Zoom call. The antidote to this is to actively add sounds that mask out the annoying sounds. Consider a small indoor fountain to create the soothing sound of running water. You can get a white noise machine to create a neutral background that masks other noises. Or you can play instrumental music at low volume through your computer speakers or a separate speaker connected to your phone.
Sound affects your mood and your productivity. When working from home, you gain the ability to create your own sound.
The U.S. has stopped distributing the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. It has been given to more than 7 million people, and there have been six reported cases of blood clotting. Here in Denmark, we have stopped giving the Astra Zeneca vaccine because of one similar case. That is not risk management, that is risk aversion.
Risk management is one of the basic leadership tasks. The leader has to decide if the benefit of a certain decision is worth the risk of something bad happening. If we could calculate the exact probability and the exact impact, risk management would be a purely mathematical exercise. But since both probability and impact are only vaguely known, the leader has to use his or her experience, evaluate contrasting opinions, and make the call.
There is a classic short story by Stephen Leacock called “The Man in Asbestos.” It is from the time where fire-resistant asbestos was considered one of the miracle materials of the future. The narrator travels to the future to find a drab and risk-averse society where aging has been eliminated together with all disease. Machines produce everything anybody needs. Since everybody will live forever, barring accidents, railroads and cars are outlawed as too dangerous. Nobody needs to go anywhere, and nobody does. In this future, everybody has everything they need and lives forever, but the narrator is appalled at consequent stagnation.
That story was written in 1911 but was very prescient. We have since eliminated many risks and have increased our standard of living immeasurably. And we are less and less willing to accept any risk.
A leader accepts the risk and reaps the benefit. But our decisions are increasingly influenced by experts who point out the dangers. If you have dedicated your life to immunology, you know what the risks are. From the viewpoint of the immunologist, it is safest to lock everybody down until everyone is vaccinated. A political leader takes that input together with input from economists and other experts about the costs of lockdown and makes a leadership decision.
In organizations, the equivalent to the immunologist resides in legal, compliance, QA, risk management, or validation departments. They point out all the risks – children might swallow our product, we might get sued, we might have our operating license revoked. The larger the organization, the more of these departments of innovation prevention you will have. It takes courageous leadership to overrule the objects of the naysayers. The reason smaller organizations are able to out-innovate larger ones is that they can spend their leadership time on innovation and growth and instead of on fighting organizational units dedicated to preserving the status quo.
As an IT leader, it is your job to make sure your organization doesn’t get paralyzed by risk aversion.
Did you get smarter or dumber this week? The brain needs exercise just like muscles do. The physiology is completely different, but research shows that we can add more brain cells by using our brains just like we can add more muscle mass by using our muscles.
Because it takes so much energy to run a human brain, the body is always looking for energy-saving shortcuts. If you allow routines to run your life, the brain saves energy – and becomes dumber. Keep your brain fit by giving it new challenges. You don’t have to learn LISP or to play the piano, but you should always be working on something new to keep your brain interested. What new skill or challenge will you give your brain to work on this weekend?
In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss risk aversion. The U.S. has stopped distributing the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. It has been given to more than 7 million people, and there have been six reported cases of blood clotting. That is not risk management, that is risk aversion.
There is a classic short story from 1911 by Stephen Leacock called “The Man in Asbestos.” In it, the narrator travels to the future to find a drab and risk-averse society where aging has been eliminated together with all disease. People can only die from accidents, which is why everybody wears fire-resistant asbestos clothes, railroads and cars are outlawed, and society becomes completely stagnant.
We are moving in that direction. Large organizations have departments of innovation prevention, often called compliance, risk management, or QA. It takes leadership to look at the larger benefit and overrule their objections Smaller organizations can instead spend their leadership time on innovation and growth.
As an IT leader, it is your job to make sure your organization doesn’t get paralyzed by risk aversion.
Your job in IT might not be inspiring great passion. But you need something in your life to be passionate about. People with a passion have a reason to get out of bed each morning. Their passion helps them power through adversity, and people with a passion live longer and happier lives.
Dylan Nardini just won Scottish Landscape Photographer of the year. He is not a professional photographer. He has driven a freight train for 28 years, and came to appreciate the wonderful landscape he was driving through. He picked up a camera, and landscape photography became his passion.
As an IT professional, you could contribute to open source projects. Or you could help a local non-profit organization or sports club with their homepage. Or you could volunteer to help people with few computer skills. If you don’t have anything you are passionate about, try some different things until you find your passion.
