Save Our Species – S.O.S.

Tired of making as much money as I could before I died at the promised span of 3 score and 10 years, tired of leaving a shitty mess for the generations to come after me, tired of wondering why! I decided to play my own game instead of the silly game that we accept as modern life right now. I gave up my career in computing to use the skills and abilities God gave me to help my fellow man by trying to make the world a better place than I found it. My experience is in system analysis and design, risk assessment and disaster recovery planning. My gift is vision and intuition.

I naively began my career giving people exactly what they said they wanted in their new computer systems. I was surprised to be greeted by disappointment, frustration and even anger when what people asked for turned out not to be what they wanted. Later I realised that most people didn’t understand their own business problems well enough to tell me accurately what they needed. What they thought they wanted was very rarely what they needed. I became expert at listening to people explain what they thought they wanted in a new system, then interpreting what they said they wanted into what they really needed.

Nothing is wasted though and what I learned from my time spent in the world of IT has been of infinite importance to the work I am doing now. From my experience in systems analysis and design, I have observed a common pattern to the evolution of systems.

A new business usually starts with a good idea and an enthusiastic spirit. Young, eager and desperate for business the new company is prepared to do anything and everything it can to accommodate customer’s needs to get their business. Flexible and dynamic, the company is able to flow and adapt to the needs of the market place. Eventually, with a little luck and a lot of hard work, the company is rewarded with steady moderate growth. As a reputation is established and it continues to focus on customer needs the company attracts new customers at an ever-increasing rate.

Things couldn’t be better and at the time, though this might seem like a dream come true there is a growing problem hidden within the young company’s successful expansion. Each new customer slightly increases the overhead of administration, as does each new member of staff required to service the growing business.

Eventually, like the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, the business grinds to a halt. More time is now being spent on administration of the company’s assets and staff and than on the delivery of the company’s product or services to its customers

At this point most companies, if they can afford the investment, will consider installing a computer system to automate the administration of the business to free up human resources so they can focus on servicing customer needs once more. The construction of a computer system requires all the rules of the business to be collected, documented and then written down as lines of code in a computer program. It is a big investment in terms of both time and money but if it’s done properly, the investment will more than pay for itself by allowing the company to work much more quickly and efficiently. Employees’ time and energy can again be focused on productive moneymaking work rather than unproductive non-profit making administrative tasks.

For a time after the new system is installed and settled in, everything works well and the company starts to expand and grow again. The system is doing what it was designed to do efficiently and well.

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.

- Oscar Wild -

Over time though the marketplace evolves and the customers’ needs change as they always have done and always will. Now not only is the company large with a large momentum making changing direction difficult, it is no longer dynamic and flexible. Creating the computer system meant that the rules of the business were ‘hard coded’ into the computers. Written in stone – so to speak. Changing them is not so easy now and usually quite expensive. Because the investment in the computer system is usually significant, there is a natural reluctance to modify or replace the system so the company will attempt a couple of strategies to avoid having to change the system.

If the company is large and powerful enough and especially if it has little or no competition, it will attempt to bend its customers’ needs to fit its existing systems and method of working. Whilst this might suit the company and allow them to continue generating uninterrupted profit, it is much less satisfactory for the customer. Instead of customer needs now driving the direction of society and thus business, the company’s system is now dictating the way society is able to progress and evolve.

If the company isn’t large enough or there is sufficiently strong competition, the company will be forced to deliver what the customer wants otherwise the customer will simply go elsewhere. The company still has to do everything through the existing system even though this doesn’t fit the company’s systems any more. Being forced to work outside the constraints of the company’s computer system generates huge amounts of administrative work for the company and makes them extremely inefficient again.

The company now has two choices.

1.      Continue using an out dated system

2.      Re-design the systems to fit the new way of doing things

The first option will lead to the eventual demise of the company. More and more effort will be required to allow daily business to continue while trying to work around the hindrances of the system until eventually the company will be so inefficient it will collapse.

The second option requires investment and effort. There will be inevitable resistance to change by employees. During the switch over between systems there will be a period of uncertainty and settling in. Things may seem to get worse for a short time until the glitches are ironed out and people get used to the new way of doing things.

In the business world economics and politics will dictate the strategy adopted. The decision will probably be delayed as long as possible because of the natural resistance to change, a reluctance to face up to the problem and a very real resistance to paying for a new system.

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.

- William James -

Human Society has today reached the same point in its journey as the company above. Most of the systems in use today have their origins so far back in time that we tend to assume they are universal laws instead of systems that were created by mankind. Because we didn’t see their beginning, we assume they have no end. We think this is the way it has always been and so it must be the way it always will be.

Whilst all these systems once served an important purpose the circumstances in which the systems evolved have long since gone. We are still clinging desperately to outmoded and outdated systems that no longer serve their intended purpose and instead now take nearly all of our time and effort just to survive the system.

When was the last time, as a species, we took a step back and asked ourselves, where are we going? Do we really want to go there? Is this system helping us go where we want to go, holding us back or even forcing us down a path we don’t want to go? What can we do to change it?

Foolproof systems don’t take into account the ingenuity of fools

- Gene Brown -

Instead of our systems making lives better and helping us to reach a stated mutual goal, we are now slaves of our own creation. We are forced to become experts at playing the system. Human ingenuity is now fully focused on finding more creative ways of playing the system to make a profit rather than finding ways to help us evolve and grow.

Our intrinsic common sense tells us all, which is the right choice for the company in the example above and it’s the same choice we must make for humanity now. It’s the only choice, if we want a future for our children. We have the power to change it and the choice to create whatever alternative systems we want.

Please add your comments about what you think is wrong with our systems and how you think they could be improved.