I just finished an interesting new book by Rob Austin, Richard Nolan and Shannon O’Donnell, called [Adventures of an IT Leader][adventures]. The authors offer a fictionalized account of a business executive’s ups and downs after being assigned the job of CIO for his company. The book does a good job of describing the dilemmas faced by Information Technology leaders, and offers some helpful (although not always simple) advice on how to confront these issues.
At the end of the book, just as our hero is starting to feel like he has a handle on this whole CIO thing, he meets up with a shadowy, wizardly character who has been offering cryptic, sometimes zen-like advice over the course of the tale, and this guy proceeds to burst our hero’s bubble.
…you said you think you know some things. What you mean is, you’ve constructed simplified representations of how those things work. But don’t confuse yourself by thinking your simplified mental constructions are realistic, or worse yet, true … Nothing useful is real. If it’s complicated enough to be realistic, it’s too complicated to be useful. That’s why we build models. Representations. When we say we know things, we just mean we have mental models of those things that we like. Often we like them because they’ve been useful. But let’s not confuse having a useful model with actual knowing.
Managers have a problem … when they fall in love with a particular model of how something works. When they become convinced that a mental model they have of how something works is the right one. When they decide that they know something. … when we become too wedded to a model, we lose our ability to deal with new situations.
