[By Leda Glyptis]
Did you happen to see the photo of the esynergy dinner, posted on social media last week? If you did, you probably noticed people engrossed in conversation, in a glorious setting. So engrossed were we, in fact, that I forgot to take a single picture. Not a single one.
But those are the best conversations, aren’t they? The ones that totally captivate you in the moment and keep playing out in your mind afterwards.
In fact, I had occasion to think about the themes of the conversation soon after our dinner, following a totally random and unexpected conversation in a totally different setting. Not a sumptuous dining room but rather a grotty piccadilly line train carriage.
You see… I got chatting to someone on a train recently.
I know. It’s madness… what was I thinking? In my defence, he started it, he broke the cardinal rule all Londoners hold dear: absolute and total silence on the tube.
And I responded, which is bad enough and then we discovered we had to get off our train and wait for a replacement and we actually continued chatting while waiting for our train.
Comrades in adversity, you may say. Even though this is not how we do things in London.
But I broke the rules and I was rewarded. Interesting conversation. Interesting guy. Excellent company while waiting on a drafty platform.
It pays to break the rules sometimes.
He told me what he does for a living. I told him what keeps me busy.
He had done his stint in banking, for his sins. Not a bank I have worked with, so whatever he was thinking of when he said this, was not my fault. I want this clearly on the record.
And what he said was ‘if banks ever actually listen to you, you will be out of a job. Have you thought of that?’.
My first reaction was to share a chuckle with my train friend because he’s right. Of course he’s right and yet, you know, I fancy my chances of being employed for a while yet. I don’t think there’s any imminent danger of all major banks getting their modernisation ducks in a row suddenly and overnight.
I reckon I am good till retirement, if I’m honest.
But the more I thought about it, after we parted ways (we did part ways, it didn’t get weird, I promise), I kept thinking about what he said. Because actually, even if all the banks did listen to me overnight, I would still not be out of a job and not because of my magical ability to reinvent myself…
The thing about modernisation is, of course, that it is very complicated and rather scary (which is why people keep trying to get out of doing it or keep doing it tentatively and poorly) but also, the thing about modernisation is that it is never quite finished. A bit like housework, but more expensive and considerably more exciting.
I almost feel I should be whispering this, in case people hear it and decide it’s all even harder than they had originally anticipated and everything grinds to a halt as a result. But the truth is, even if people do the thing, there’s going to be another thing for them to do almost immediately. But I don’t need to whisper. The people really doing the work know this.
In fact, at the very dinner my friends at esynergy hosted, my favourite question asked by people around the table was ‘hey… have you used X yet?’ because they know some new technology will always require their due attention (and diligence). A new problem will require reflection and solution. An old problem will require new skills. The existing and the new will need to be constantly optimised, recalibrated. Improved.
Optimisation is an ‘always on’ business. Be it for performance, security or competitiveness. You are never quite done.
And look… confession time: I like this, not just because, as my new buddy joked, it ensures a job for life but because I like learning new things. I like being in the not knowing, being faced with that feeling of ‘hang on a minute’ and trying to learn new things, work out what to do with them, where to put them, mentally, and how to work out what is true, what is important, what is relevant. I like it a lot.
I like it when a group of people who have really done new things time and again (like the people we had around the table for the esynergy dinner) get to talking about the things that didn’t quite behave as expected with tears of laughter in their eyes. Because of course that’s how building things for the first time plays out – never quite according to plan.
But I appreciate that not everyone likes this feeling, not everyone likes being in a situation where the goal posts keep moving. The problem is that’s where we are. Like it or not, it doesn’t change the reality of the situation. We are living in times that change so fast there is always something new to learn.
In fact, this is where we’ve been for a while, although admittedly, we haven’t quite realised that for some time. We’ve been in this situation, not knowing we are in this situation and we have made (as an industry… as a species) a set of decisions that, with hindsight all things being considered, make life harder than it needed to be.
Because the things we didn’t do, and the things we did, but half-heartedly or slowly, complicate what comes next and I know I have written about this before but it is no less true for being known.
So I guess my new friend is right. I have me a job for life.
Only it’s not the same job. That’s the whole point. In a changing world, the job changes by the minute. And I love it, But I am under no illusion: it’s hard. It’s hard work and it’s hard on the person.
Because the thing about this kind of work is that it’s always hard, but you do it better the second time round, and even better the third.
I always suspected that and my research for Beyond Resilience proves and confirms it and conversations like the one that prompted this piece go further still in confirming the value of each and every scar.
It stands to reason: doing something again and again helps you get better at it. You build muscle memory, you develop instincts. You identify certain pitfalls. Because your instincts get sharper and because you may have fallen right into said pitfalls on your first go-round.
It’s not in the least surprising that doing things repeatedly would make you better at them. What should be surprising is that having done an extremely hard thing, you would actually choose to do it all over again. But thankfully for us all, people do.
In fact, looking around the table at our esynergy dinner, all I could see were faces of people who have gone before and will go again and although their stories were different, they had a few things in common. They asked questions and paused to listen to the answers. Fancy that. They shared their learnings without the coyness of ‘if I learned the hard way, so should you’. And they also seem to implicitly align on the simple view that, in a world where technology innovation gives us opportunities but also gives the bad guys an infinite playground, ‘resilience’ is on everyone’s mind.
System resilience. Because of everything, not just because of DORA. If anything DORA is because of everything.
A resilient culture. Especially for your engineers who need to solve new problems in new ways every day while anticipating failure modes, staying creative and learning new skills. But also more widely, as the unexpected seems to be happening with alarming regularity and your culture needs to cope and thrive in these times.
And although they don’t talk about it at all, I see it:
Personal resilience for the leaders. The choices they make, the pain they take and the fact that they do it knowingly and willingly because they believe that with each go-round they can do better than last time.
So I guess my new friend is right.
I have a job for life because transformation is a never ending story.
But also because this work is hard and most people would rather do literally anything else.
Most people would rather just do what we’ve always done. Carry on taking things on one day at a time, definitely not challenging the status quo, definitely not taking unnecessary risks… most definitely not making new friends on trains.
So the work of changing things big and small falls on the shoulders of the few undaunted enough to try and resilient enough to keep going. Time and again.
Turns out, it’s not so much about breaking rules but having the foresight to realise when they no longer need apply and the courage to act on that realisation.
Time and again.
