Are you suffering from chapter one syndrome?
Keeping up with the latest thinking in technology can be hard. New products emerge every day, and existing products shift and change. If we did nothing but read announcements from technology providers, then our days would be full. If we tried to understand the implications of all those announcements, our nights would be full too. And, to make things more complicated, it’s not just technology that changes: the ways in which we build, organise and manage technology also change. I have had to relearn how to do things many times.
If you’re anything like me, you have a pile of unread books (either physical or virtual), and a creeping sense of guilt about not having read all of them - and that sense of guilt gets stronger as the pile grows higher. But where will you find the time?
That’s why it’s easy and tempting to fall prey to ‘chapter one syndrome’. This is what happens when we pick up the big, daunting book (often with the animal on the cover), start reading, grasp the foreword and the introduction, familiarise ourselves with some superficial terms, but find ourselves out of our depth or out of time by the end of chapter one. We put the book to one side (probably back on the tower of unread volumes) and promise ourselves that we will come back when we have more time. But we don’t come back - although we do convince ourselves that we have now ‘read’ that book, and that we have a good understanding of the concepts we encountered in those first pages. When they come up in meetings or strategy sessions, we nod and smile in recognition.
Those of us in leadership or management positions should also admit that chapter one syndrome arises as much from over-confidence as from time pressure. If we are fortunate enough to have many years of experience and a successful career, we may think that new techniques or new technologies can’t be that different from anything we’ve seen before, and can’t be that difficult to grasp. Surely a quick skim to grasp the essentials, accompanied by a few short press articles and a whitepaper from a consulting firm (where we may succumb to page one or even paragraph one syndrome) will be enough to grasp the essentials - and we can leave the details to the team. Perhaps they will even summarise it for us in a few bullets on a slide.
I admit that I have fallen prey to chapter one syndrome many times. And each time it has inhibited my ability to lead transformation and change. I suspect I am not alone.
If, like me, you have suffered from this syndrome, you may also recognise the most likely consequence: transformation in name only. This is what happens when we try to change our ways of working but, instead of making deep and difficult changes, we just swap the labels to match those we saw in the first chapter. We put the word ‘Agile’ at the front of our in-house project methodology. We call the project progress meeting a ‘stand-up’. We give our project managers new job titles. We may even invest in some new furniture. And then we wonder why things are still going so slowly, why we keep missing our SLAs and why everybody still seems unhappy.
What can we do to avoid chapter one syndrome? The one thing we cannot create more of is time, and I wouldn’t recommend that people use up the precious time they have to work through that backlog of books - unless that’s what they really enjoy, in which case they probably don’t suffer from chapter one syndrome anyway. My recommendation (and a resolution which I try to follow) is to make better use of the time we have to learn. I find that three things help.
Focus: I don’t think that I will ever stop buying books that I don’t have time to read. But what I can try to do, once I have taken a book off the pile, is to stick with it until the end, and not give in to the temptation to jump to the next book when the going gets tough. I find that with many difficult books there can be an engagement barrier once we get through the introduction - a point beyond which we feel the weight of our ignorance and everything seems a bit more difficult. My experience is that, if I can find the time and energy to keep going beyond that point, the difficulty becomes an attraction, and I will make it to the end.
Think critically: we don’t have to agree with everything we read. Books about new ways of thinking and working may be written in a confident tone but, just like everything else about the young industry of enterprise technology, they are still trying to figure things out. I try to read technology books in the same way that I read philosophy books - with a pencil in my hand, a critical mind, and a feeling that I am engaging in a discussion, even if it’s a one sided discussion conducted in marginal notes. This doesn’t mean that I think that I always know better, but I find that I understand a book more deeply when I feel that I have had an argument with it.
Admit ignorance: I’m often surprised by how quickly new terms become part of the common vocabulary. For example, I can remember first hearing the term ‘Site Reliability Engineering’ in 2016 and being intrigued by the concept. Before I could understand it fully, it seemed to be everywhere: lots of companies had an SRE programme. It suddenly felt a little embarrassing to admit that I hadn’t yet properly grasped what was rapidly becoming a standard industry term. The most helpful thing to me then was to admit my ignorance, and ask experts in my team to educate me (an important part of team building is to hire people smarter than you).
We cannot know everything. But, if we are to succeed in enterprise technology, and especially if we are to lead transformation and to lead others, I think that we must find the ideas that really matter, find the books that explain them well, and read them to the last page.
