All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

I’ve solved the airline overbooking problem. Yes, this does apply to IT in the enterprise. Be patient.

Unless you were completely off the grid last week, you know about the contest between United Airlines and Dr. David Dao. Dr. Dao had purchased a ticket, boarded an overbooked United flight, was randomly selected to give up his seat because United had overbooked the flight, once it counted its own flight crew that also had to get Louisville. Dr. Dao refused to give up his seat.

The result: United enlisted the help of three airport police. One concussion, two missing front teeth, and a forehead gash later, they dragged the 69-year-old Dr. Dao from the airplane.

(Sidebar: If you’re certain United had the right to remove Dr. Dao from the flight and the entire argument is about technique, or, if you’re certain it didn’t, please read PolitiFact’s Analysis. Short version: Citing Embry Riddle Aeronautical University aviation law professor Stephen Dedmon, PolitiFact concluded: “The specifics of Dao’s case can currently be debated but not resolved without knowing all the specifics or legal interpretations. It would take a court ruling to decide UA’s provisions were appropriate and properly applied.”)

The airlines inform us that they have to overbook, because some passengers who buy tickets don’t show up, resulting in empty seats on the flight. They overbook to compensate in order to maintain profitability. Occasionally, due to the laws of statistics, this results in a few more passengers than seats.

I have a better solution. It does require an advanced degree in statistics but is otherwise quite workable. In layman’s terms, it works like this: Don’t overbook!

Here’s how it would work: A passenger books a ticket for a flight. That means the airline has the passenger’s credit card information. Change the rules so the airline can charge passengers for their seats whether or not they show up. Empty seat or full, the airlines don’t lose money, and in fact they gain a bit, because the plane weighs less and uses less fuel.

We can sweeten the airlines’ pot even further: Five minutes before flight time they can sell any remaining empty seats to travelers flying standby.

This isn’t even hard. But what’s it have to do with enterprise IT?

Enterprise IT has its own passenger no-show problem. It works like this: Through the magic (okay, bureaucratic nightmare) of the IT governance process, a business manager … or, if you’re Agile, product owner … gets a project request approved.

No matter what methodology you use, if the business folks don’t show up for interviews, walkthroughs, workshops, and such … if you have empty seats, that is … your project can’t move forward.

To solve this, some IT shops emulate the major air carriers. No, they don’t send in the local police to remove business stakeholders from wherever they are and drag them to where the project’s business analyst is waiting for them, amusing as that might be.

What IT shops do is to overbook, although what they call it is multitasking: Developers and business analysts are assigned to enough different concurrent projects that there’s always something productive to work on for at least twelve of them.

This is a terrible idea (see “The end of multitasking as you know it,” from my old InfoWorld “Advice Line” blog). One of the most important factors in achieving reliable project success rates is the flip side of this coin — to only launch fully staffed projects, with “fully staffed” defined as “never waits on the availability of a project team member.”

Instead, IT should rely on a solution roughly analogous to what I suggested for empty seats. Only instead of selling the unused interview time to a different project’s business stakeholder, the EPMO (enterprise program management office), IT Steering Committee, or whoever or whatever else is responsible for IT project governance establishes a three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule: If business stakeholders fail to show up for interviews, demos, daily stand-ups, or what-have-you in ways that slow a project down, the project is immediately and unceremoniously cancelled.

This might sound draconian. It might be draconian. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable.

Start with the understanding that there’s no such thing as an IT project. Projects are always about business change, so if business stakeholders don’t show up when they’re scheduled to show up, the intended business change can’t be very important to them.

The analogy isn’t that you’re booting them off the flight. You’re cancelling the flight.

Or something. The analogy isn’t what matters. It’s getting even with those lousy no-shows.

No, that isn’t it. You’re merely adjusting to the company’s dynamically changing business priorities. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Or at least, it’s the boarding pass.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Empathy is widely misunderstood.

We’re told, for example, that psychopaths lack it. And yet we’re also told they’re able to figure out their victims’ emotional buttons and levers, exploiting them to achieve their nefarious goals.

Accurately figuring out someone’s emotional buttons and levers sure sounds like empathy to me.

I’m just messin’ with you. True empathy means vicariously feeling what someone else feels. Psychopaths don’t experience the feeling. They infer it.

If you want to be a mensch, true empathy is pretty useful. But if you want to be an effective leader, psychopathic empathy is the way to go.

Oh, now, don’t look so horrified. I’m not suggesting you become an out-and-out psychopath. Just to emulate this one ability.

See, something leaders have to accomplish from time to time is organizational change, “time to time” meaning every single day. Sometimes we’re talking about the micro level of getting a bit more out of an employee whose performance is currently just an increment better than adequate. Other times the change might be a complete transformation of how an organization gets its work done.

Inept leaders, of the when-I-say-frog-you-jump variety, rely on their authority to make change happen.

Inevitably, they fail … not in making any change happen, but in making the intended change happen. Put leaders like this in charge of some dog sleds and they’ll end up pulling not only the sleds themselves, but also dragging their huskies behind them as they complain to each other about how lazy their dogs are.

Effective leaders, in contrast, don’t only get their huskies to pull the sleds. Their canine followers think pulling the sled is their idea, and an excellent idea it is, too.

But enough. If I keep this up the metaphor police will hunt me down like a dog. And so …

Effective leaders of organizations don’t say “frog” expecting their minions to immediately jump. Effective leaders rely on persuasion. They do everything they can to encourage the men and women who do the work of their organization to understand the intended change and why it’s a good idea. More than that they encourage them to participate in figuring out what the change should look like.

Much of which requires empathy. Not empathy of the I-feel-your-pain variety. I-feel-your-pain empathy might, in fact, lead to unproductive management hand-wringing — regret over the pain the change will inflict on members of the workforce.

Nope. Effective leaders have developed their inner psychopath — their ability to analytically figure out how different individuals and groups are likely to respond to what they have in mind, and why. It’s this insight that lets them adjust their plans and their communications so as to minimize resistance and maximize active participation.

Example: Quite a few years back I facilitated a discussion about resistance to the implementation of electronic medical records (EMR) systems. One participant vented his frustration that of all people, it was the doctors who were most actively resisting this obviously important change in how hospitals and clinics do their work. He just couldn’t understand how the best-educated members of his workforce could be such Luddites.

And so, we applied some psychopathic empathy to the situation.

What, I asked, motivates doctors? Why did they choose their profession? Answer: They want to cure patients of what ails them.

And were doctors (I asked) likely to consider the planned EMR system something that helps them cure patients, or a distraction when compared to clipboards at the foot of the bed?

This having happened in the pre-tablet era, the new EMR system meant walking over to a new and unfamiliar application running on a PC that wasn’t as conveniently located as a clipboard at the foot of the bed. Distraction it was.

Second example: Back in the day, when IT leaders were trying to pry their batch COBOL programmers loose from their old habits to embrace object-oriented programming and on-line, real-time systems, many refused to be pried. Why might that be? Shouldn’t a bunch of techies love new and shiny tech?

Well … no. The combination of OO and designing and programming on-line systems was a change that invalided the COBOLites’ hard-won expertise and turned them back into novices. Why would they like that?

We’re talking about a clear-eyed thought process, not a complicated one. Just look at the change you have in mind through the eyes of different stakeholders and stakeholder groups and figure out how it will affect them.

Psychopaths use their ability to infer motivation to manipulate people. You could use the same ability to persuade them to follow your lead.

What’s the difference? Good question, for which I’m not sure there’s a good answer.

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