Karl Weick talks about mindfulness in his book on HROs. This state of mind is both individual and organizational -– if an organization can be said to have a mind — and is an idea that several other authors describe using different terms. Reason (I think) has called it “perpetual paranoia”. When I was sailing in the BVI last week, my instructor told me much the same thing in the context of avoiding collisions: “The first rule is never to assume that the other guy knows what he’s doing!” Mindfulness, I submit, is something that forms part of expertise. If you know what to expect, and can resist the temptation to be a “yes-man” and look for confirmatory evidence, then you are more likely to notice discrepancies. Looking for movement is one of the things our brain is set up to detect, and a difference from the norm is also a kind of movement, although not in a temporal dimension. Another Karl, Karl Popper, talks about the asymmetry of evidence in proving, versus disproving, a hypothesis. Famously, he talks about how the hypothesis that “all swans are white” cannot be proved by observing white swans, no matter how many white swans you observe, but can be disproved by the observation of a single black swan. This mindfulness, the ability to look for evidence to indicate that the things are not what they should be is, I submit, what regulatory agencies need to embrace; they should drop this silly idea of becoming a proactive organization. Proactive means “Acting in advance to deal with an expected difficulty.” This is a lofty goal and I don’t think it can be achieved. What can be achieved, however, is to improve mindfulness and retain the agility to react more quickly and expertly to deviations from the norm. I may see a deviation but sill not knows what to expect, but have a notion that it’s reducing safety. I don’t need to know how that deviation will play out because there may be other deviations that form part of the safety chain that I haven’t observed. Reacting to such cues may appear to a novice observer as being “proactive” but it isn’t – it’s just that the expert is reacting to cues that are not observable to the novice.

I just finished Craig Larman’s  book on Agile Development and began reading Managing the Unexpected by Karl Weick and am noting similarities in the way he describes High Reliability Organizations (HRO) and agile methods. One of the challenges we have in software development is to find a workable management style for the development teams. My experience is that, with rare exceptions, BP and IT managers still think of software development as 2167a waterfall, and they are really not that interested in becoming part of the development team. When they do become part of the team, they tend to overreact on the side of organizational inclusiveness, and you end up with more SMEs than you need, and then only for the initial phases of the development effort. (And of course, like any bureaucracy, fail to heed the observation that “availability is not a skill.”)

I applied for CSC’s Solution Architect Development Program a few weeks ago – one of five at this site in Cambridge of which I was the only one to make it past the first round. I did my phone interview while I was on vacation at the Bitter End Yacht Club in Virgin Gorda , BVI. I got the notice of my interview when my office called me the day before, and it was a bit tricky making all this happen as I had not taken my laptop with me and had to fill out yet another form before the interview. I asked Muhannad to send the form to my public email on MSN. Fortunately my daughter had brought her laptop, and I was able to persuade her  to let me use it in the evening to download the form. The only decent wifi spot was in the bar area where a reggae band was playing, making concentration impossible, but I was able to download the form and work on it in the quieter hotel reception area. I did the interview the next day by cell phone sitting on the upper deck of the reception area, overlooking the bay, mimosa on hand. The folks who interviewed me asked  good penetrating questions, to which I felt I gave only mediocre responses, but the point is, that this could probably not have all come together like it did a few years ago. With cell phones, we expect to be directly reachable all the time, and we expect to have computers with common software installed  and good Internet access. With the emphasis on reduced emission, and now this latest scourge, the swine  flu, we have got to make virtual teams work. I’ve been reading Craig Larman’s book on Agile and Iterative Development and while appreciating all that he has to say on agile development, it remains  an assumption by most authors that team members can be collocated. As humans, we rely to a huge degree on non-verbal communication and the sense of camaraderie that working in the same place fosters, but we need to make virtual teaming work.