Month: September 2024

Reliving the Corporate IT experience on the train?

It’s been a strange morning.

It started with an early alarm call so that I could get to the railway station in time for a meeting down in London. I used to do this trip regularly but it’s been a while, so long that I felt like a novice. The timing from bed to being seated on a travelling train used to be highly tuned with very little hanging around. Today I was stood on the platform 25 minutes early wondering what I was doing there.

The journey to London is only just over 2 hour according to the timetable. This makes for a long day but not a ridiculously long one. I’d rather do a long day than spend multiple nights in a hotel. I like my home comforts and never sleep that well in a hotel bed, besides, I needed to be back to go to the theatre on the following evening.

Sat on the cold platform with my coffee and pains-au-raisin all seemed good (why are station platforms always a few degrees colder than anywhere else, and why are platform benches made of metal?) I met someone I knew and we chatted for a while before the train arrived. It was 11 mins late, but we’ve learnt to regard that kind of delay as normal for this trainline.

Resting comfortably in my seat we travelled through the Lancashire countryside and into Cheshire and on to Staffordshire. Warwickshire beckoned on what was a misty autumnal morning. The green of summer was starting to give way to the golden colours of the new season.

The first hour was sailing along and it felt like my plans for the day were going to work out just fine.

I was admiring the light shining through the mist when we started to slow down. “Not good” I thought. Eventually we came to a complete stop somewhere in the middle of the country. I couldn’t tell you exactly where because this also happened to be somewhere with little phone signal and the wifi was being hammered.

Eventually the Train Manager came on the intercom with an ominous “ping-pong”.

“There is a technical fault with the train and the driver is currently talking to signaling for advice. I’ll keep you informed when we know more. Hopefully we will be on our way soon.”

“Ah well,” I thought, “I’ve got plenty of time before my meeting.”

This is where it all got very Corporate IT.

The next update from the Train Manager was that the driver was going to “turn the train off and back on again” this would apparently take 10 minutes and the lights would go off for that time.

“You need to turn it off and back on again?” 🤦‍♂️

How many times has a Corporate IT Service Desk given someone that advice? It happens so often that it’s become a running joke. If you are really smart you don’t even bother calling the Service Desk until you have turned everything off and restarted it all.

(There’s a reason that you are told to do this and it’s probably not what you think it is.)

The impact of restarting an application or even a PC is minimal, it’s annoying for the individual concerned, but a train? I couldn’t decide whether this was their way of explaining the process in a simplified way so that everyone kind of understood, or whether that was really what was going to happen.

True to their word and after a period where the lights went out, the Train Manager was back on the intercom. Unfortunately a reboot of the train hadn’t fixed the fault and we were going to run in “safe mode” to the next station. The image in my mind was of the Windows xp safe mode screen, which was etched on my memory from many a long evening trying to fix an issue.

The next station was only a few minutes away and we’d then have to get off the train and wait for the next one. I’m assuming “safe mode” meant that we were traveling more slowly than normal but it was hard to tell.

As you would expect the next train was itself already late. It had been waiting for us to get going and it was rammed full. I could have chosen to wait for the next one a few minutes later still, but I decided that standing for an hour was a safer option.

I made it to my meeting an hour later than planned having stood by the carriage doors with several other bored screen obsessed, non-communicative, passengers all of us in the same predicament.

When I got to my my meeting I told the others about my experience. One of the other attendees told us how his car did the same thing and required the same treatment from time to time. “They tell you to reboot your car?” 😲

Some people are very worried about the robots taking over and subjugating their human masters. I don’t think we have too much to worry about just yet. If they do become too dominant we’ll just turn them off and back on again, that should sort it 😉

Header Image: Not today, but a recent morning view on my regular morning walk near my home.

We need to feel the urgency | Working Principles

Are you a planner?

Do you prefer the last minute?

What makes you respond with urgency?

I was recently out on my morning walk when I stopped for a chat with one of the locals who likes to sit on a bench near my house. He’s an interesting character so when he started to tell me about some people “sleeping rough” in the fields nearby I didn’t think too much of it. Sitting there on the bench he theatrically described where they were and how he’d gone over to them earlier that morning, woken them and told them to “Get off my #*&%ing land!” He looks quite scary but they’d simply rolled over and ignored him.

I was planning on going that way so would take a look as I passed; out of curiosity.

Sure enough, as I crossed one field into another, there on the top of a small hill were a set of sleeping bags and other detritus. “That’s interesting” I thought and left them to it, it was early and they were asleep. Also, there were more of them and I’m not as scary as my friend from the bench.

They didn’t look like people who were homeless or in distress. Where they were camping was out in the open on an exposed hillock, not where you’d sleep if you were sleeping rough. They didn’t have tents or bags of belongings. It looked more like local kids making the most of the last few days of the summer holidays.

A few days later I was back out doing my walk and wondered to myself whether they were still “sleeping rough.” I was also hoping that they had left the field in good order. Sadly, there was rubbish spread across the area where they had been. Annoyed and saddened I looked around pondering what to do when I noticed a plastic carrier bag with the branding of the nearby convenience store.

That simple plastic carrier bag sparked an urgency in me. It was time to get this mess tidied up, an urgency that eventually resulted in me filling the carrier bag and creating another bag out of a fleece blanket that had been left behind. The spoils in hand I headed back home depositing the rubbish in a public dustbin on the way.

Why did I act? What was it that made this situation urgent? Why couldn’t I leave this mess for someone else to tidy up? Why did I feel an urgency to sorting it out?

All of the definitions that I could find for urgency include words like: swift, immediate, pressing, important, speedy, action.

Plenty of emotion in those words.

The litter made me feel an urgency.

And yet, in business we have a habit of forgetting the emotional aspects of urgency.

We create statistics that tell people that we are 5% behind the progress that we should be making.

We send people emails from senior people imploring them to fill in the latest survey with logical reasons why they should.

We use cascade techniques expecting each individual further along the line to care about the message that they are delivering.

We expend huge amounts of effort communicating facts that leave us cold and unmoved.

Is there any wonder that they don’t move us let alone move us with urgency?

I didn’t reason myself to urgency on that hillock, I felt annoyed, and the annoyance gave me an urgency. No statistical analysis changed my attitude.

If we want people to change, to act, we need to work out how me make them feel the urgency.

Some of the biggest challenges of our day, climate, war, are urgent. It’s time for us to work out how we feel that urgency.

People who bring transformative change have courage, know how to re-frame the problem and have a sense of urgency.

Malcolm Gladwell

Cover Image: From a morning walk a few months ago. This is the field where the “rough sleepers” were.