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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Usually, I get the joke.

I don’t always think it’s funny, but at least I get it. Not always, though — in a recent column I reported on the antics of a certain “Dr. Richard Paley, teacher of Divinity and Theobiology, Fellowship University,” who exposed all of us in IT as Darwinians, atheists and pagans. As a number of readers were kind enough to explain, “Dr. Paley” is a satire. In my defense, The Register reported the story as fact, a Hoaxbusters search came up empty, and I did find it hilarious. I just didn’t realize it was supposed to be.

Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection appears in this column on a regular basis. This isn’t because “Survival Guide” is related to “Survival of the Fittest.” The latter phrase, never used by Darwin himself, comes from Herbert Spencer’s ludicrous theory of “Social Darwinism” — ludicrous because it considered fitness to be absolute, justifying hereditary aristocracy as the consequence of natural superiority.

In Darwinian theory, fitness is contextual, measuring how well a heritable trait fits specific conditions. That’s a concept you can take to the bank when managing your career: Success comes from how well you adapt to circumstances. There are no panaceas, which means we can all ignore the 90% or so of all business pundits who sell “the answer” without first hearing the question.

This same philosophy can help you plot a course for your IT organization. I’ve read various authorities expound on the proper role of IT in business. Some call for strategic partnership, some consider IT’s proper role to be a service provider, while yet others think we’re an “information utility.” If they understood modern evolutionary theory, they’d spend less time advocating one or another as the right answer, and more assessing which circumstances each of these very different models is best suited to.

Evolutionary theory applies to all situations in which entities compete, which means we in business can benefit from a century and a half of scientific research. To take just one example:

The estimable Richard Dawkins has argued that natural selection is a competition among genes, not whole organisms — that an organism is just a gene’s way of succeeding. This insight simplifies the apparently mystifying behavior of companies that self-destruct while creating “shareholder value.” Substitute gene for shareholder and organism for company and everything suddenly makes sense –plenty of bodies are designed to die in order to help their genes succeed.

The lesson for you: Shareholder value and your own best interests don’t necessarily coincide. Plan accordingly.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Given current sexual harassment law, you probably can’t show Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant film, Rashomon at your next off-site staff meeting, because the plot involves a sexual encounter (mentioned, not graphically depicted or discussed in detail). It’s too bad. Rashomon provides a powerful metaphor for your attempts to find out what’s really going on in your organization.

Rashomon is a crime story, except that even what the crime was isn’t certain. None of the accounts match up, even though two of them are from the victims — if, in fact, they were victims. The alleged perpetrator’s rendition confuses things even more, and even an eyewitness description doesn’t resolve the viewer’s uncertainty. When the movie ends, all you know for sure is that you’ll never know anything for sure. Sound familiar?

Last week’s column described some techniques for getting information — if not straight information, at least straighter. Here are some more ways to help you get as clear a picture as possible.

  • Don’t rely solely on your chain of command. Create opportunities for employees to communicate with you directly — for example, regular small-group lunches and monthly all-hands meetings. Also, make sure employees know you welcome one-on-one time if they need it.
  • Confidentiality si, anonymity no. Employees need to know they can trust your discretion — some of what they tell you could place them at personal risk otherwise. Don’t, on the other hand, provide anonymous communications channels. Anonymous information is worthless: You have no way to distinguish between important information and simple backstabbing.
  • Surveys. Occasionally, ask employees to fill out “state of the organization” questionnaires. You won’t get very much useful information — the results will be devoid of nuance. What you will get is a cross-check: If survey results are seriously different from what you think you know, your information-gathering mechanisms need revamping.

“But wait!” I can hear you object. “We’re the information technology department! Can’t we solve this with software?”

Technology can help, but not very much. To the extent objective measures can help you determine how your operation is running, information technology, in the form of automated systems management tools, will give you a useful picture.

Useful, but seriously incomplete, and except where the system collects all data automatically, your IT is simply processing information that’s potentially biased at the source.

GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out — is an old term in IT, reminding us that all the technology in the world can’t fix wrong data.

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