🐿️ Leap of Faith - The IPT Newsletter

Originally published 5th August 2024

Every time you take a bite, you’re affirming your unwavering belief in the expertise and good intentions of hundreds of people you’ve never met. The vegetable lasagna I had last night tasted great and didn’t make me ill because:

• Farmers grew, harvested, and stored the ingredients according to food-safety standards.

• Shippers kept the items cold, labelled them accurately, and got them to their destination on time.

• In the factory that assembled the dish, the staff kept the facility clean, followed safety rules, and cooked the food appropriately.

• Programmers and operators gave thousands of robots the right instructions to choose the meal I ordered, pack it appropriately, and avoid spillage and contamination.

And that’s just a few of the specialists involved in feeding us–there are many more, including agronomists, microbiologists, and chemical engineers. We even have detectives seeking out dishonest and malicious people trying to adulterate our food. As with the famous pencil, no one actually knows how to make a frozen dinner; it’s the result of countless co-ordinated actions by a host of experts.

We trust those gurus to produce our food safely and well–but just believing in their expertise isn’t enough. In centuries past, the king had a taster and the peasant her nose; both were tests to verify that the meal was fit to eat, a crude form of “trust but verify” that was good enough to let our ancestors avoid most catastrophic risks (or we wouldn’t be here!) Today in most countries we have robust food-safety rules, which are sufficiently reassuring that you probably don’t have to think about what you put in your mouth except when something goes wrong. But notice we’re still verifying the output of the authorities; we’ve just outsourced our checks to the health inspector.

What seems so odd to me is that our safety depends just as much on the know-how and execution of software engineers as it does on the expertise of farmers and chefs, but we’re strangely unwilling to ask even the gentlest of questions about what those developers are actually doing. We interrogate those who want to toy with tomato genes or grow lamb in a lab before we let them anywhere near our food chain, but we don’t raise a ruckus when programmers decide to halt progress for a three-year rewrite or forget to train their chatbot or update 8 million computers at once. Let me clarify: we certainly do wring our hands and look for “root causes” after the software horse has bolted, but not before. For example, nobody at Humane seems ever to have asked, “What the heck is this Pin thing actually for?”, and the UK’s National Health Service actually has a policy for critical software systems that involves no verification at all that vendor systems really operate as expected. Terminal tech shyness is so endemic among my clients that I had to have these printed up (hit reply and I’ll post you a signed copy for your wall):

So instead of just bemoaning our unwillingness to quiz and challenge authorities, I decided to do something about it. Next week, I’ll be recording the first session of the Insanely Profitable Tech Podcast, where I’ll be joined in each episode by a well-known business expert for an in-depth conversation. I’ll be poking, prodding, and provoking to help you understand my guest’s area of expertise–and also as an example of how to ask genuine, searching questions of your own staff, peers, and vendors. And I’m so committed to probing queries that I’ll be livestreaming the recordings on YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and including your thoughts, comments, and enquiries live (two audio episodes will follow after each live recording). My first guest on 15 August will be the redoubtable leadership guru and product-management innovator Johanna Rothman and we’ll be talking about how to sweet-talk the CFO and get budget for literally anything–something both of us have been doing for at least a quarter-century! Register to join me live and participate in the recording, and subscribe to the podcast to ensure you never miss an episode.

This first appeared in my weekly Insanely Profitable Tech Newsletter which is received as part of the Squirrel Squadron every Monday, and was originally posted on 5th August 2024. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here: https://squirrelsquadron.com/