Culture of (Fear of) Failure
“Everyone scared die. I die, You die, Everybody die.”
I guess i should first introduce myself. I work in Tech for a Southeast Asian Media Company. It is a distinctly old media company. A dinosaur. There’s a saying here that “All Roads Lead to Print”.
Over the few years that I have been here I have noticed the culture of fearing failure. Paraphrasing my ex boss: “You don’t have to do anything right. You just don’t have to do anything wrong.” Over the years, I have been taught that the nail that sticks out gets hammered in. That I should just follow what everyone else is doing. Why make things difficult for myself?
I have stories. Many stories. But hey, I am in a media company right? So, let’s write some content.
Broken. Everything is held together by duct tape.
The website has stability issues. I am not going to lie. It is a monolith. A black box of gears and springs. Adding new parts to this box will cause other existing parts to break and we will not know till it is too late.
An editor deleted a whole bunch of stories once. It was an accident. He wanted to delete a journalist who has resigned but deleted both the user and all the stories that the journalist has ever written. Didn’t realized until a couple of days later. Upon finding out, the problem was reported to the tech team. Any tech engineer would go: “Thank god for backups!”. Nope. Turns out the backups done daily by the infra guys only last for 1 day and gets overwritten the next day. All the stories have been wiped from existence.
Apparently they have fixed this and will be doing more backups in future. How do we know this issue has been fixed? Only during the next major disaster, of course! :)
We run a very broken agile system. In other words, we let stakeholders tell us what to do. We let the tech illiterate tell us what to do everyday.
If you notice, there are many services that the media company provides to users. For example, they send out telegram and whatsapp messages to anyone who registers for it. For those who do not know, a group is set up in this social messaging apps, and an automated message will be sent everyday with whichever story is doing well that day. You know it’s done? A poor guy on duty manually sends a message to the group everyday. Fully manual. They tell everyone that it’s automated.
Embrace Failure
Sure. I would say it’s a good attempt to embrace new technology. But there is no phase 2. If it’s doing well, there’s no attempt to improve the workflow. If it’s doing poorly, there’s no attempt to kill the drain in resource. So now, we are stuck with one guy halfheartedly posting a story a day. (Is it really the “top story”? That’s a story for another day)
Let’s not fear the reaper.
If something works, find out why it works and add WD40 and see it fly off the tracks.
We are serving 384 people (at this point in time). Do these people pay money to the company? No. Maybe these people can increase the pageviews of the articles if they click in to read! Less than 50 clicks.
If something isn’t working, try to find out why it doesn’t work. Why continue draining resources on something that doesn’t work? Failure is always an option.
Always set a cut off. “If I do not get a 2% increase in page views from this feature, I would kill it off.”
In doing so, we can focus our efforts on whatever has value.
Failure is only a failure if nothing is learned from the failure.
Well… If only stakeholders actually look at data…….. (To be continued.)