The Thermocline of Truth
robm.me.uk
robm.me.uk
Hanlon's razor would have been useful here. How could anyone honestly believe that mass collusion amongst a distributed and isolated group of people, that was also perfectly successful, was more likely than an IT failure?
>They told her that there simply couldn’t be problems with the IT system on the scale that was being suggested
and thus they provided her with plausible deniability. Like that Enron CEO who supposedly didn't know the financial details and relied on what is told by his CFO/etc.
The whole article sounds like a whitewash of senior management responsibility by blaming it on the lower ranks who reports "rosy picture". No wonder that the author seems to be a successful consultant - i can see how his expert opinion may be helpful for such a whitewashing by establishing the existence of the "thermocline of truth" in the specific situations what he gets brought into and thus is liked by the upper management.
As an extra example of "thermocline of truth" - that EBay CEO discussed again just yesterday who supposedly didn't know how his security chief with the gang were criminally harassing the blogger to carry out the CEO's order to “take her down”.
I think approaches like RICO or SOX or plain old army principle that the CO is responsible for whatever happens under his command are the examples of the tools to pierce the "thermoclines of truth".
This is pure speculation and I don't want to sound like I'm supporting the Post Office and Fujitsu's behaviour, which was despicable.
I wondered if their previous systems were, internally, considered to be very flaky. You then get a new shiny system with a very different set of results and instead of the response being "why is the old system and new system disagreeing so badly" you get the response "hey, this is great, the new system has revealed wrong doing the old system was not able to".
As I say it's a guess but I just wondered.
This whole episode calls to mind the authoritarian reaction to "impossible" hacks of the various chip'n'pin schemes rolled out in UK over the years. The credit cards were assumed to be perfect, so account holders were held responsible when they got hacked. [0] In general, individuals in conflict with giant organizations should have access to appeals outside those organizations.
[0] https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2012/09/10/chip-and-skim...
- Have every exec spend one day a week with leaf-node workers, just learning and asking questions.
- Rotate all middle managers regularly. When a project has problems, blame is shared by several managers, making it easier for the current manager to admit failure. When a manager rotates off a project, they lose their influence and ability to under-report problems. The new manager is incentivized to look closely for problems and over-report them.
- Do not allow middle managers to determine promotions and bonuses of managers and leaf-node workers. Have the execs do it, or hire someone specifically to do it. Without this influence, middle managers lose some ability to suppress bad news.
- Split your company into several smaller companies and eliminate all middle managers. This limits the size of the organization to about 1,000 people: CEO x 10 VPs x 10 managers x 10 leaf-node workers.
- Have execs and board members interview exiting leaf-node workers.
- Hire an outside company to provide an anonymous whistle-blowing service with big cash rewards for being the first to report false progress reports and covered-up problems. Does a company like this exist?
This is so endemic to all organizations.
When you shoot messengers, expect to receive fewer messages.
Most modern organizations don't have pure messengers. The king is his messenger. That can blur the line between accountability and transparency. For example, in this case, the messengers were the senior managers partly responsible for the mess.
Good managers clearly delineate that boundary. Bringing bad news isn't punished. But making bad calls alone may be. In practice, this takes discipline to do.
In December 2019, at the end of a long-running series of civil cases, the Post Office agreed to settle with 555 claimants. It accepted it had previously "got things wrong in [its] dealings with a number of postmasters", and agreed to pay £58m in damages. The claimants received a share of £12m, after legal fees were paid.
Those lawyers abused them worse than the Royal Mail did.
>There was upper Apple management, basking in the sun; the great mass of Apple employees below; and between the two, a constantly shifting layer of middle managers whose function appeared to be to keep the two groups from mixing.[0]
[0] http://andstillipersist.com/2006/08/guerrilla-programming-li...
In my mind the behaviour of the Post Office was very, very poor but there are people within Fujitsu who had, and have, a much greater understanding of the modes of failure that might have resulted in the discrepancies that were being seen and yet, as I understand it, they went along with Post Office as they trashed people's reputations, livelihoods and threatened their freedom.
There's a simple heuristic:
Are you only hearing good news? That's bad news.