Strategy Series: Do not sweat the details; or take a risk and embrace change
I was originally going to be inflammatory and title this “Details don’t matter”, but at the last minute I walked it back. This topic is consistently a pile of hot garbage. Why? Many reasons. Because technical people are, in general, extremely detail focused, and often binary minded (right/wrong, black/white, yes/no, 1⁄0). Because of this, a great many times we as technical people can hyper-focus on the details, especially when change is on the table. The more dramatic the change, the more focus on the details.
There is also a fair amount of sensationalism in our industry.
Don’t get me wrong, details are actually important. But details are also the pandoras box of almost any It endeavor. Details are the iceberg that sunk the titanic. They’re the Yoko Ono to the Beatles. Details get in the way of strategy, they act as a quagmire for innovation.
While listening to the latest Network Collective podcast, as they were discussing the next things, 2020, and what folks are expecting this year, the usual suspects were present and accounted for: SD-WAN (let’s not get me started on that one…), Automation, orchestration, etc. Those conversations started the wheels spinning on the last few years, my experience with automation, orchestration, and a decade of working on SDN. Once again, I came back full circle to this: the technology is largely unimportant. Back in 2017, I wrote about change. While that post was pretty high on the spectrum of extreme irreverence, it holds just as true today as it did in 2017, and in 2015, and in 2000, and in 1900.
As Thomas Edison one famously said “Hell, there are no rules here– we’re trying to accomplish something.” What we often forget, however, is that the lack of rules is not just in the technology space. What has hindered innovation for millennia is fear. As highly functioning technical people, we tend to gravitate toward details - and more specifically understanding those details - for comfort. That human nature of needing to comprehend what we do at a deep level is a double edged sword.
Enter technical bias and it’s close first cousin technical debt. Just as Yoda said, Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering and so to does hyper focus on details lead to decision paralysis, which leads to technical bias, which leads to technical debt.
Cultural and operational implications of disruptive technologies are hard. Sociological impact of change on an organization is the most difficult part of any technical project. I have given several public talks on this subject, the first of which was at a conference in Estonia and can be seen here, my talk starts at 33:00, and the slides are available here. The most recent was a talk on Cultural and operational implications of disruptive technologies for the EPOC project and is available on YouTube here, or below.
While the material here is largely focused around SDN and automation, but it doesn’t really matter - the concepts are the same and the answers are clear: Don’t obsess about the technology, the details, the tools, the gear. It’s largely irrelevant.