Southwest Airlines and the Gremlins of Technical Debt

It is Halloween season, so I indulge in a few monster movies when I have downtime.  I am partial to the old Universal monster movies with Bela Legosi and Boris Karloff.  I also enjoy anything with Vincent Price, and I consider his film “The Abominable Dr. Phibes” one of the most frightening things I have ever seen.  There is something about monsters lurking in the shadows which always gives me a great scare.  One of my favorite monster movies comes from director Joe Dante entitled “Gremlins,” which is a fantastic popcorn movie and a parody of entertainment culture at the same time.  Today, on the blog, I want to discuss a different kind of gremlin lurking in the shadows and how it has been fouling up air travel.   

The term gremlin was invented by the British.  In the early days of aviation, airplanes were not mechanically reliable; engines would jam, flight controls would snap, and canvas would tear without explanation.  Mechanics and pilots often blamed these mishaps on “gremlins,” nasty elf-like creatures who liked to cause mischief on an aircraft in flight.  By the Second World War, pilots from the United States and Royal Air Force had stories about gremlins.  If anyone has stories about these creatures from the German, Russian or Japanese Air Forces, please share them in the comments.  Suffice to say, gremlins were an excellent alibi for poor maintenance, bad design, or dumb luck.  The gremlin became a part of aviation culture. 

I keep thinking about these critters the more I work in technology.  I wish I could invoke them during a debrief of a poorly executed project or use them to explain a server outage.  Unfortunately, gremlins are mythical creatures, and if I use them to present a technical problem, the CIO of my client would laugh at me and then ask me to pack my desk and leave the building.  

Gremlins are comforting, compared to the problems technical professionals face with increasingly complex systems.  Earlier this month, Southwest Airlines could have invoked the little monsters during a three-day weekend when it faced a severe shortage of flights.  Some pundits on the internet spread the false rumor that the slowdown was a strike created by pilots who refused to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.  The reality is less about the civil disobedience of pilots than the negligence of Southwest Airlines and its Information Technology systems.

According to the Southwest Airline Pilots Association spokesperson, “I point to how they (Southwest) manage the network and how I.T. supports that network.”  It seems the union has been complaining about the reliability of I.T. systems for over four years.  Company officials have not commented on the claims but based on the events of the long holiday weekend, it is easy to see how an outage can ground an entire fleet of planes.  

I understand why something like this could happen at a large organization.  The internal system which schedules flights is buggy or unreliable.  Debate within the organization happens, and a decision is made not to fix the system because the cost and inconvenience are greater than dealing with the flawed system.  The conscious choice to do this is called technical debt in the agile community.  It sits in the organization like a time bomb waiting to explode the business at the least convenient time.  I suspect that is what happened to Southwest Airlines. 

Having technical debt in your organization is like having a box of gremlins and tossing them into a swimming pool.  Bad things are going to happen.  It is why everyone in an organization needs to regularly look at technical debt and give it a serious evaluation. Otherwise, your organization will get grounded.  To avoid a horror movie corral the gremlins of technical debt, you will be glad you did.  

Until next time. 

Using Agile to Save an Organizational Shipwreck

The agile reformation has been my passion and livelihood for over ten years.  I strongly believe in making work more sustainable.  The global economy is highly complicated, and it takes intelligent and conscientious people to transform it one cubical at a time.  I spend my time writing extensively about agile and corporate culture.  Over the years, I experienced many of the ugly realities of being a business person; the lack of job security, erratic behavior from vendors and clients, regulators with good intentions, and plenty of colleagues who act in bad faith.  

The business world resembles being shipwrecked and trapped in a lifeboat.  After days of hunger and thirst, each survivor attempts to cannibalize the others or throw them overboard to the sharks to save themselves.  Rescue is elusive, and the ocean threatens to destroy everyone.  The agile movement is a friendly shore to find refuge.  Unfortunately, I see business organizations ignore this kind of relief and remain adrift.  I have given this plenty of consideration, and I have a few informed opinions about why organizations prefer to be shipwrecked.  

Inertia is a concept from physics, and Issac Newton first described it as the ability for an object at rest to remain at rest or an object in motion to stay in motion.  You expend energy to overcome the force of inertia.  In business, this energy equals the expenditure of time and money, which are precious resources.  The corporate culture of most organizations attempts to minimize the wasteful use of time and money, so inertia builds up and acts as a weight on the organization's ability to change.  People are content to avoid rocking the boat and terrified of risk, and being shipwrecked is preferable to rowing to safety.  

Fear is another factor.  Companies have to generate a profit and meet the expected profits of their investors, creditors, and shareholders.  It puts pressure on leaders to wring as much money out of the organization.  Lay-offs and outsourcing are necessary tools in this process.  What it does is create a level of uncertainty and fear in an organization.  It forces people to ignore inefficiency or waste because exposing it might lead to unemployment.  Thus, agile with its rapid cycle times and inspection heightens fear in the organization. People who are afraid have two choices;  they flee the company, or they fight.  It is the people who remain behind who throw sand in the gears of change.  To them, the status quo at an organization is preferable to changes that are threatening.  

Fear and inertia create a cycle of dysfunction within an organization.  I must also point out poor leadership as the third piece of the triad.  Those individuals struggle to keep promises and prefer hoarding information and resources.  You point out problems to this kind of leader, and they politely ignore them and often like to fire the messenger who brings them those problems.  It is about control for those people, and anything which is a threat is resisted.  Using the Pareto rule, 20% of your leadership team creates 80% of your waste and inefficiency.  Agile is good at finding these people, but out of self-interest, they will fight back.  

Combined, fear, uncertainty, and poor leadership create an environment deeply resistant to agile.  It is just like being lost at sea.  I will continue to educate and train others about making work more sustainable, satisfying, and sane.  With a bit of luck, more of the shipwrecked will find friendly shores.  

Until next time.