Haft of the Spear

Matt and I met once: he remembered, I did not. The circumstances were a call from a training honco that went something like, “Mike, we need someone to brief I&W to a class of new hires and our regular fell through; can you come down in 10 minutes?” I only had about five fires burning at the time, so I went, and I tap-danced my way through (I prefer a little prep time under normal circumstances, if nothing else just to get my witty banter circuit warmed up). I recall that it was not my best performance, but it was apparently better than the whale songs the fresh faces had been listening to the last couple of days because he still talks to me.

Naturally I do my best to track what the next generation is up to these days and so it is with great interest that a mutual friend clued me in to Matt’s latest missive. It deserves a full read.

• The general thesis is rock solid. Any donkey can cast stones and wallow self-righteously in their preconceptions. Unless you’ve been (figuratively) shot at, don’t talk to me about your thoughts on bureaucratic combat and what is wrong with the Infantry. If you are not prepared to put up in some fashion, do everyone a favor and shut up. You are not saying anything we’ve not said to ourselves.
• There is a tendency to underestimate how complicated the inter-workings of gov’t actually is (are?). Some of this is by design, some not, but the model of code it; it works on my box without breaking; publish isn’t going to fly absent a tectonic culture and technology shift. Not a dissuasion of innovation, just a call to recognize that the “its simple” meme only works in a few domains.
• Focusing on the functionaries is important, but without influence from the top there is no hope for real change. I have lived through numerous “reforms” under various guises but none succeeded to any significant degree because the fundamental metrics never changed. If the bottom line is that I’m rated on how many widgets I produce, I’m not going to give two-s***s about whether or not I follow the TQM approach or use my mad ‘black belt’ skillz or if my efforts were culturally sound: I’m friggin’ going to show up at the end of the year with a ton of widgets. As long as the boss is counting beans, not how you pick them, “reform” is just talk.
• We cannot assume that anyone in a position to actually bring about some change – appointee, executive or senior functionary - is anywhere near as literate about these issues (tech, colab, etc.) as any of us who are talking about implementation. Listen, this is a community where a the equiv of an EVP in IT has to ask, “What does XML stand for again?” Trust me, there is a lot of education that still has to take place.
• Comey and Goodling are good examples, but the take-away is not that Goodling and her ilk do things that are untoward (“pleasure of the President” means something after all), but that at the end of the day a lot of this boils down to politics and politics and what makes sense rarely mix. One of the main reasons why the status quo is just that is because reformers (or grand strategists for that matter) rarely take the time to consider how this plays back in Peoria. If there is pork involved you’d better come to the table with at least one solution that has the balance sheet come out in the black. Any serious IC reform effort that leverages technology for example, if fully and rapidly implemented, is going to result in people being RIFed (and not just feds). The gov’t isn’t (or shouldn’t be) a make-work jobs program, but tossing people on the scrap heap willy-nilly isn’t smart either. There is a big human element to consider here.
• “If you’re a dynamic person, you’ve got an advantage,” truer words were never spoken. Listen; gov’t service can wear you down, give you an ulcer even, but if you put in half the effort you do in blogging or twittering or tweaking your Facebook page, trust me, you’re going to come out looking like a rock star. The dinos left over are very much Wally; if you’re anything like Asok the sky is the limit (the timeframe is a little longer than in other domains, but the end result is the same).
• The idea that we need an honest broker between the ‘preneurs and the old guard is one that seems to be percolating through a lot of minds these days. I don’t know what it takes to get something like that off the ground, but if my TT 2.0 efforts are any indication it is probably a big check (or a lot of smaller ones) so that people working it can quit their day jobs without losing their houses (or at least funding the equiv of 20% time). Not like there isn’t critical mass of support or bodies to work it …

I would like to think that we are on the cusp of some serious change in this business, primarily because we have the technology to help implement the ideas. By and large none of us is breaking new ground thought-wise; what has been lacking is the cheap, easy, fast and value-added way of implementing those thoughts. I will probably never get rid of a certain level of cynicism, but the part of me that actually holds out hope for progress gets bigger by the day.