Risk and risk avoidance

I've seen a few references recently to Malcolm Gladwell's piece in the New Yorker (subscription required) taking on, in that way he does, the conventional wisdom that entrepreneurs are risk-takers and heart-breakers, hard-charging individuals with vision and boldness who forge ahead regardless of the consequences and break into markets where others wouldn't dare. Quite to the contrary, Gladwell says; most ground-breaking entrepreneurs have done everything possible to minimize risk, to maximize their chances of success by not leaving room for failure.

A brief review of the article appears in this Business Week post, which suggests that this isn't news to most successful business owners and operators. That is in line with my experience, as well, dealing with many of those entrepreneurs in my day to day business. They have usually planned hard to get where they are, focused in on what they need to do and how to avoid stumbling, and they play every card to make sure they get the execution correct.

This comes up as a topic on a blog about agile operations because it both addresses a level of planning that many in the IT world neglect, and it takes on a popular myth in the industry, that of the maverick coder or sysadmin, who by strength of will and intellect single-handedly pulls together a great system or application, frequently storming past the mere mortals in management or business units who may oppose him.

In fact, operations that run this way are ripe for disaster and if it hasn't happened to them yet, it will at some point, because no one is immune to risk, even if they prefer to act as if they are.

Successful systems are those built with a recognition of and a system for managing what are called "Normal Accidents." Dmitriy Samovskiy has a post discussing normal accidents in complex IT systems that talks about the implications of the book in the IT world and it's right on the mark.

Agile, both with respect to development, and operations, is in large part about managing the risks that we all run of suffering these normal accidents. There's almost no way to foresee the often unique and tawdry chains of events that lead to such accidents; the only way to manage them is to step back from the immediate context and ask what can be done systemically to minimize their impact. And perhaps not surprisingly, this can be done by making some very practical adjustments such as simplifying those systems in the first place, improving communications, creating processes that don't rely upon outcomes, and putting control in the hands of people who know the work best. These are the things that agile operations are about; they provide a level of meta-control over the uncontrollable, and in doing so, diminish risk and increase chances of success.