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Reprinted from Keep the Joint Running.

Scientists call it the observer effect. It's what happens when the act of observation affects what they're observing. Werner Heisenberg used it to develop his uncertainty principle. It's why medical researchers use double-blind treatment trials and placebo controls.

It also might explain an anomaly several of you called to my attention following the statistics I mentioned last week regarding the H1N1 virus.

Early reports indicated a 30% rate of contagion and a 1.25% mortality rate. The most recent U.S. statistics on the pandemic - one million confirmed cases and one thousand deaths - yield a mortality rate more than ten times lower.

Proof that the Alarm Industry has been at it again?

More likely, the observer effect is at work. In round numbers, every single healthcare professional in the United States has been thoroughly prepared to properly diagnose and treat the disease.

What's missing: Clinicians do not report (and most likely can't accurately determine) what the outcomes would have been without the preparation they received. Lacking this information we have no certain way to determine whether we should be cautiously celebrating success or angrily attacking the false-alarmers.

I'd say the odds favor it being the observer effect.

For several weeks we've explored the personal risk of successful prevention, and what to do about it. Leave it at this: Whatever you're trying to prevent, whether it's malware intrusions or unnecessary calls to the Service Desk, do everything possible to define metrics that can document success when it happens. Yes, it makes you the beneficiary of Metrics Fallacy #4 (see Chapter 3 of Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21^st Century Information Technology). The alternative is worse: Being the victim of your own success.

But go back a few steps, to where you decided you had something important to prevent. Imagine that instead of prevent you chose one of the other four possible responses to a risk: Mitigate (reduce the impact through an approved contingency plan); insure (share the hurt with others); accept (either hope, or decide the risk is so remote or minor that any advance effort is a fifty buck solution to a five buck problem); or oops (miss the risk entirely and be caught by surprise).

It doesn't matter which. In project-management parlance your risk has become an issue. In plain English you have a problem.

Now what?

First and foremost, you and your team have to deal with the problem, quickly, thoroughly, and professionally. It's a matter of self-respect.

Then you have to choose one of the four responses to realized risk that no methodology will mention - the political responses: Conceal, minimize, blame-shift, and report. Here's how they break down:

• Conceal: Yes, conceal. Ever hear the phrase "We give employees information on a need-to-know basis"? With a bad reporting relationship, or in highly political organizations that have a blame-oriented culture, carefully filtering the information that ascends the organizational hierarchy is a critical survival skill. If you and your team can deal with the problem without it gaining much visibility, your manager might not need to even know it took place.

• Minimize: A variant of conceal, you minimize a problem by making sure your manager knows it occurred, but not that it was worth his or her personal attention. The operative phrase: No Big Deal (NBD). Minimize when your manager might hear about the problem from someone else and draw the wrong (or, worse, the right) conclusion.

• Blame-shift: Here's a great example of choosing the least of the available evils. You know you work for a company that considers Holding People Accountable to be the alpha and omega of management science. As "The dark side of accountability," (Keep the Joint Running, 11/3/2003) explains, it really means the company will select a scapegoat. There's no particular virtue in allowing it to be you.

The preferred technique for blame-shifting is to let your manager know what happened, make it clear you and your team have it under control, and, under the guise of root-cause-analysis, clearly finger the person or team whose oversight allowed the problem to occur.

• Report: Imagine you have a positive working relationship with your manager, who cares more about planning, respecting plans, and getting things done than about blamestorming. That's when you report, accurately, what happened, how it happened, what you're doing about it, and what should change so the problem doesn't recur.

Everything is easier with good leadership, isn't it? It makes you wonder why there's so much of the other kind.

 

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Robert Lewis is president of IT Catalysts, Inc., a consultancy focused on improving IT organizational effectiveness and integration with the enterprise. Contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

 

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Copyright 2009, IS Survivor Publishing, all rights reserved.

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