It’s mid-December 2020 and once again the UK stands on a precipice, with the options of crashing out of the European Union under a Free Trade Agreement that will decimate[1] the economy (at best) or without one, in which case things will be substantially worse. Millions of words have been written about how we got into this stupid predicament but just recently I have been looking at it in a slightly different light and reflecting on an experience from my professional life late in the last century.
In the mid 1990s I was responsible for a division of an IT services company that provided computer reservations systems to airlines around the world. Before I got the job the company had entered an agreement to supply a very large system to an airline in another country. I am trying hard not to identify the airline here although people who know me in real life will immediately identify it from my description of the situation. This airline was state-owned and its management had what can only be referred to as a civil service mentality. The particular state had an interesting approach to ensuring diligence on the part of its employees. Every decision ever taken by a government employee was subject to review at any time up to that employee’s death. Any decision that was determined to be sufficiently wrong could result in criminal prosecution. The best way to avoid that danger was quite simple. Never take a decision.
Unfortunately the avoidance of decision making is a bit of a problem when you are trying to implement a comprehensive update of an entire company’s commercial, operational and administrative processes. On the upside, the team that I inherited on the ground at the airline’s head office was made up of highly competent people and I had a project manager who was skilled in managing the customer’s politics. As a result the project made progress – slower than it should have done, but progress nevertheless. I spent a lot of time there myself. Later I calculated that I had visited the site, which was a nine hour flight away, thirty times over a two year period.
Gradually the project inched towards completion. Many software modifications were made to accommodate the airline’s own particular ways of doing business. In general the airline management was looking for us to change the system such that they would not have to be responsible for changing anything under their control. The technical team worked absolute wonders to do most of it but some of the requests were simply impossible to fulfil. Sometimes it was down to contradictory requirements from different parts of the organisation but other things they asked for were literal impossibilities. Progress meetings became fraught as we brought in experts to explain why the thing they were asking for simply couldn’t be done, not by us and not by anyone. We asked them to put forward any expert they could identify to tell us we were wrong and how we were wrong but they could not – or at least they did not.
In the end the issues were escalated. The airline’s CEO talked to my CEO and the CEO of my parent company. They agreed that all efforts must be made to bring the system into production and that I must work with the senior airline management to bridge the gaps and get cutover done.
I went to the airline’s head office and determined to stay there until there was a solid plan for cutover in place. I took the approach of triage. Working with my excellent project manager I collected all the outstanding issues and divided them into three categories. Category 1 issues were cutover-critical. We agreed that we would fix them to the customer’s satisfaction before the system went live. Category 2 issues were ones that the customer could live with. We agreed that subject to time and resource availability we would fix as many of them as we could before cutover but we explicitly stated that we were not guaranteeing anything about this category of issue. This was very important because this was where we parked the actual impossibilities. The things that couldn’t be done by us or, as far as we knew, by anyone else on the planet. Category 3 issues were minor irritants that everyone agreed could be dealt with in normal post-cutover maintenance. After several days of intense effort all was agreed and signed off. Literally signed off. Ink on dead trees, in duplicate, signed off.
So, we fixed the category 1s and a good number of the category 2s, though not of course the impossibilities. We cut over the system and after a few alarms and excursions it was deemed operational. Muted celebrations were held and I was able to go home to my family.
All seemed well for a few weeks until I started to get messages from the project manager that the customer was agitating for the rest of the category 2s to be done. At first I didn’t worry too much. I sent back messages referring to the signed cutover plan in which we had explicitly said there were no guarantees on the category 2s. That cut no ice in the customer head office. Despite the document that simply said that we would do as many as possible of these things ahead of cutover and nothing else, various people in the customer organisation were now saying that this implied that we would do them afterwards. Given that many of them were logical impossibilities this was obviously never my intention and I had been careful in drafting the document to make this clear.
None of that mattered. The dialogue took on a life of its own. My opposite number at the customer swore blind that I had promised to do things after cutover if they were not done before. The fact that there was a document that he had signed saying something different became irrelevant. I held firm – what else I could I do? He was literally asking for impossibilities. When he got nowhere with me he escalated and eventually his CEO talked to my CEO and word came back down the chain of command that I was to deliver all of the category 2 modifications. Clearly I couldn’t do that. Long story short. I got fired.
So, coming back to the present day, where do I see parallels? Clearly the promises made by the Brexiteers were in large part contradictory and impossible to deliver. You can’t have the benefits of membership without paying the dues. You can negotiate on exactly which benefits you want to retain and which dues you are prepared to pay but the bottom line is that a prerequisite for retaining cake is that you don’t eat it all. The problem we have now is that the people who understand that have been systematically purged from positions of power and influence. Everyone who remains is convinced that the quantum superposition of having cake and eating it too is viable at the macro scale.
My airline customer managed to get me fired from the best job I ever had because being right about impossible requirements wasn’t enough. The current political leadership of the UK is somewhat like the person who got my job primarily by being a golfing buddy of the CEO. They still couldn’t deliver the impossible stuff but they had me to blame it on. It didn’t do them much good in the long run though as the company was horse-traded away as part of a much bigger deal involving the parent company. And the airline that gave me all the grief? I am neither happy nor sad to report that it doesn’t exist any more.
