Author Archives: Jonathan

Risk and the universal currency

I’ve been thinking about risk for the last five years. Everywhere I look, I see bad behaviours that get in the way of genuine risk management.

This is going to be somewhat out of left field for most followers, who enjoy whimsy and occasional software engineering. I apologise for that. Skip this one.

This theory comes from being in a large organisation that wants a consistent risk appetite but cannot possibly have one, and results in rigidity that stifles innovation and masks genuine issues. It’s also come from a background in engineering massive software systems for government, where we think about tolerances in terms of budgets, not as numbers devoid of context.

This is a reminder that money exists because barter systems are confusing and impossible to maintain.

In short, this is my unified theory of risk.

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S14E03: At last! My arm is complete

Sometimes I get a week full of people telling me what they see, and it is very often a pleasure. That has been this week, more or less.

My old – very old! – corporate objective reared its head again. Working on a single codebase that’s closely coupled to policy has been a fascinating journey, as I’ve watched it become more and more out of date. It was, once upon a time, policy as code. The policy is different now and, knowing how slowly policy changes compared to the real world, means the code was probably out of step before the policy was changed. We might have noticed that the policy, and hence the code, needed to change when people started trying to use the system in a way it’s not designed.

I’m thinking about this a lot at the moment, actually. There’s something about writing a lot of policy and then letting it out into the world that tells me a lot about the way the world is changing, and that’s even within the microcosm of the little corner of the world I inhabit. Is it better to write a policy that describes ‘as-is’, try to change behaviour, and then inscribe that? A kind of ratchet that means we can’t go backwards (although we can, of course), and where the iterations track the maturity of the organisation?

Another mode of thinking says that policy is a behavioural change lever. We write things down and then we use that to try to push people upwards towards the bar. Then we inch the policy up again.

Both of these are kind of bad. I think both of them are bad because the POSIWID. If the system you’re trying to police – the verbal form of policy, I reckon, is police – is doing things that aren’t in the policy you’re facing the possibility of having to change the behaviour of many, many people who aren’t incentivised to change. That means the beatings have to continue until the behaviour changes, and that’s not good for anyone. That means the first approach will result in a policy that never goes anywhere, because the organisation isn’t going to change – but it also means the second approach is doomed at once because the organisation isn’t going to change!

There are lovely, easy bits of policy – sometimes. A policy that I can implement as code becomes part of the invisible nudge of the system. If it’s easier to go along with sensible security defaults, and it’s as quick as not securing things, then folks will never complain and will generally thank you. But sometimes I need folks to change the way they do something that will slow them down, and I have to sell them that this is somehow a good thing.

And if the POSIWID, and what the system does is ‘get shit done’, it’s all kinds of hard to convince them not to do that.

S14E02: what wondrous ghosts we are

This week I’ve done policy-writing and team-being-together-ing. The team getting together was excellent. I think in part it was excellent because most everyone already knew everyone else, so we didn’t need to do the work of building trust with each other before we got into the meat of what we had to discuss. That saves time. Building trust saves time when we have to move quickly, but you can’t build trust quickly. It’s an interesting little – not symmetry, exactly, but opposite? To go fast, first go slow.

Policy writing is fascinating to me. I did a whole six-minute speech on this to some colleagues. Policy is just the writing-down of the behaviour we’d like to see. Writing things down is not performative, though I think some of us policy-writers would like it to be so, and some of us believe it to be so. This is because the system focusses on getting the words right, and POSIWID.

Sorry, I’ve introduced two completely different ideas there and rudely not told you what they’re about.

Performative actions are acts where we perform something and in doing so make it reality. A nice simple one is a judge saying “You will be taken to prison,” because upon that pronunciation it actually happens. “I now pronounce you married” changes the state of the world from one in which two people were not married to one in which they are.

Judith Butler says gender is performative, and I think that’s a very interesting thing to think about.

Policy-writers can change the world from a place where an act is permitted to one where it is not permitted. But it will not change the behaviour of the people in the world, unless there are actors who will enforce it. The words will only be performative if the actions of the actors reflect that it’s true.

I’m getting quite tired of worrying about the very specific words I’m writing, and more interested in the…vibes, I guess? Of making the changes that are written in the policy. I think most people will only make change over time, and they’ll generally follow the spirit of a policy rather than its specific clauses. So the sooner I can get in front of people and say, hey. Please make these changes to how you do your job. It’s important. I know it’s a pain. I know we’re going to argue about it. Please do it anyway. Please. Please!

…the sooner it’ll actually start to happen.

The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is an acronym1. It’s well-loved in a management science called cybernetics. It argues that the purpose of a system is not defined by vision statements or well-meaning corporate values but by what the system actually does. If the tax system creates millionaires, then that is its purpose. If a social media company amplifies disinformation on behalf of foreign governments, then that is its purpose. And if an organisation argues its purpose is to ‘change the conversation’ or ‘create high performing teams’ or ‘secure investment’ and most of their work is on writing and publishing things then the purpose of the system is what it does, and all this system does is generate tyrannical editors and an obsession with ever-more-flowery language.

If the point of the system is to change behaviour then that is what we have to make the system do.

  1. A true acronym, where you say the letters as a word, as opposed to an initialism, where you say the letters (NSA, FBI). Sometimes, for fun, if someone says that a thing is an acronym when it’s an initialism, I treat it as such.

    I know I’m obnoxious. You don’t have to tell me. ↩︎

S14E01: Alright. Let’s do this one. more. time.

I’ve got a new job (perhaps there’s something in the air) and I’m doing my best to write my stupid thoughts for my stupid mental health. I’m trying to navigate what I can talk about in my new job, and what I have to keep to myself. I’ll probably be more risk averse, at least for the first little while, and err on the side of sharing less. Luckily for you, that means more nonsense, and less work stuff. Hurrah!

I found myself quite lonely this week, on a couple of really interesting axes. The first was in myself. I’ve had a couple of home-working days when all I’ve been doing is writing policy, and I’ve found it incredibly hard. No meetings meant little human contact, and I found myself spinning my wheels. This is particularly odd for me, because I can (and have) gone entire weekends without talking to anyone at all. Work, it seems, is something I can’t do in absence of others. Books on the other hand: leave me well alone, thanks.

I suspect one reason I’ve only just realised this is because for the last two years I’ve been solidly plugging away at my MSc. Right now my grade point average is 0.74, which means I’m on track for a Distinction. I’ve still got to write my thesis, and that means sitting down and actually figuring out what the hell it is I actually want to spend 6 months on. At the moment it’s software bills of materials, but it may turn into any number of other things. I have too many damn ideas.

Coming up for breath out of that intensity has made me realise that my partner’s done the hard work of building a network in our new home, while I’ve just got more anxious about the network in our new home.1 I’ve now got to get out there and find people who do the kinds of things I like to do, which itself prompts a reflection: what are the things I like to do that aren’t work?

Oh, my friends, the brevity of that list.

It’s a joy to enjoy your work – a joy and a privilege. There is no doubt an element of autistic focus in this: I have found my special interest and have made it my entire personality and managed to get paid for it, which is a huge win. But it means that I don’t know what else I like. Still, there’s a list, and I’m going to start working through that list. Top of that list is speaking and performing. I am an absolute maniac for performance, and am nearly feral for performances about performances. I’m signing up for Toastmasters, which feels a teensy bit culty, but could be a good way to meet people who are interested in similar things to me and get an interesting qualification. There’s also a great little network of French speakers here, and I’ve found a Russian class that I could start next year.

What do you mean, “that sounds like more studying”?

Oh. Right.

  1. This is a fun little joke. The network is fine. ↩︎

S13E07: Working with others

I have a headache and I am grumpy about it. I have received a couple of incredibly shitty emails, and I’m grumpy about that. And someone whom I trusted to do some important work hasn’t done it, and I’m grumpy about that too.

Normally I’d say that I don’t know why I bother, but given that I do bother, I thought I should talk a bit about why.

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