Weak systems for evaluating performance, conducting training, and measuring success breed unaccountable people. Weak systems for maintenance of facilities and infrastructure breed undisciplined people. People accustomed to low accountability and low discipline react poorly when they are suddenly exposed to the expectation for either. Computing technology imposes the expectation for accountability and discipline because it is cold, logical. No longer can two human beings compensate for each other’s inadequacies, or smooth over an error in a request with judgment and feedback; computers only do exactly what they are instructed to do. Blaming the computer, the system, or the program for not producing the desired results is essentially blaming yourself for not knowing how to ask the right questions.
Cultures with weak accountability are attractive to people who don’t like to feel awkward or confused. Feeling awkward and confused when you cannot ask the right question is normal, it’s good for you, and it seems to be part of how we learn, but only when we are forced to revisit the dialog until we do ask the right question. That requires accountability, either to ourselves or to another, to see through to the end the dialog, and to deal with the consequences of asking the wrong questions. It also assumes that there is some positive outcome to asking the right question early on.
One of the most frustrating things for me in trying to find a job is the absence of feedback. When you work on something that is important to you and then send it off into the void, you don’t really learn what was done right and what needs to be done differently or better. That is what it is like to work in a place with no accountability. No one ever tells you what is expected, no one holds those expectations in place, and no one coaches you to be better. By ignoring the performance of the individual cultures without accountability send the message to everyone that effort doesn’t matter, that trying hard and being well liked is enough, and that nothing bad will happen for asking the wrong questions.
Culture like that will never reap the rewards computers offer, but they will spend incredible amounts of money trying to find the ‘right mix’ of ‘IT Solutions’ to overcome their failures, never once considering that the failures have nothing to do with computers.
Cultures with weak maintenance attract people who don’t like to be bored. Boring work isn’t fun, but it is necessary. Monotonous, repetitive tasks lack prestige and generally don’t pay much, but they are necessary. Spending the day on minutia that seems to have no effect whatsoever doesn’t seem like a good use of my time, but it’s necessary. Preventive maintenance is almost entirely composed of monotonous repetitive tasks and minutia. Preventive maintenance is like stepping in gum and dealing with small spiders.
In contrast, crises aren’t boring at all. They are exciting. They get the blood pumping. Dealing with crisis is like slaying dragons. Slaying dragons is fun, at least in theory. In reality dragon slaying is hard work that usually takes place when you’d rather be doing something else, and almost always is the result of some small failure that “someone” should have seen and taken care of a long time ago. Inevitably, that “someone” is you, and you find yourself in the same position as the person who asks the wrong questions of the computer and tries to blame it for answering them correctly. Dragons don’t let you ignore them; they are big, fire-breathing failures with your name on them. The whole point of preventive maintenance is to hold the dragons at bay, so that you don’t have to fight them at all. Not having to fight dragons means not having to admit catastrophic failure. Admitting failure with your friends over a round at the pub is a lot better than admitting failure to the boss while standing in the ashes of what used to be the Enterprise Information System.