Close the Door First

Imagine you left the door open in a windstorm and a bunch of dirt blew in. Does it make sense to sweep the floor before you close the door?

Crazy as it sounds, I see IT organizations do this.  A lot.  Rather than identify and solve the root cause of whatever mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, we work overtime to clean it up. 

It’s easy to understand why: personal heroics help teams bond because it makes us feel more connected and productive.  But if we don’t solve the problem first, we’re going to have to clean up the mess again and again. 

Personal heroics aren’t sustainable, they don’t scale, and they burn us out over the long term.  More important, they don’t usually solve the problem.

Next time you discover some technical debt – a PII spill, missing patches, malware – invest some time to figure out how to stop it from coming back. Create a system or process – at least a plan – to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Then use personal heroics to knock out the residual technical debt.  When you're done, you can have some level of confidence that you’ll never have to clean up that mess again.

Fooling yourself twice

Is it ever a good idea to repeat a mistake? 

Maybe.

I was speaking with two musician friends a few days ago, and one of them said "If I make a mistake while I'm playing live, I repeat the mistake so nobody notices I screwed up".  The other musician said he does the same thing.

Someone said (and it probably wasn't Einstein) that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But in this case, when these guys repeat the same mistake over and over, they do get a different result, because it makes it look like it's part of the show. 

I'm no Einstein, but this sounds crazy from an enterprise IT perspective - or does it?

Sometimes, mistakes lead to insights.  It's how we find bugs and misconfigurations. Occasionally, we even discover new ways of doing things and change our processes as a result.  Most of the time, of course, it's a really bad idea to repeat a mistake, and it is insane to repeat it over and over.

Take an honest look at your organization and ask yourself which of your processes are insane.  If you don't take the time to fix them, shame on you.   But also ask yourself which mistakes and snowflakes actually improve your process, and find a way to bake them in.