Look on the bright side: the power of applied optimism

Photo credit: Gabriel Lamza via Unsplash

Somewhere in the 20th century, at the beginning of my career, I worked with a project manager on several projects. After a while, they told me why they liked to have me on their team.

I waited for them to tell me that it was due to my technical brilliance, my architectural insight, or my all-round charm and charisma. Instead, they told me that it was because I was an optimist, and that I was quite vocal about my optimism.

That gave me an immediate lesson in self-awareness: that the attributes that people value you for are not always those that you value in yourself. I would much rather have been known as the technical wizard than as the person who says, ‘Don’t worry, everything will probably be alright’. Especially as, on most IT projects, such optimism is often seen as a sign of naivety and inexperience.

However, on reflection (and I have had many years to reflect) I have come to see the value of my manager’s perception. I think that optimism – and a particular type of optimism – is of special value in enterprise technology endeavours.

It starts by setting the tone for the team. Technology teams can often seem dour, grumpy and pessimistic, especially if they are working on ageing legacy systems. It’s not unusual to see an excited and enthusiastic business person with a great idea have their energy drained as they are told by a succession of experts that everything will be far more expensive, far more difficult and take far longer than they expect – and that’s before they’ve accounted for the inevitable production failures, over-runs, underperforming suppliers and cyber attacks.

Technology people often complain that they don’t have enough money in their budgets: to hear them talk about all the obstacles that stand in the way of delivery, it is sometimes surprising that anybody gives them any money at all.

Starting with optimism prompts us to remember why we work in enterprise technology in the first place: to build awesome systems out of pure logic; to delight end users; to do things that no-one has ever done before; or whatever reason motivates you. When we remember this motivation, we can think of all the ways in which we can use our technology superpowers to bring that excited, enthusiastic business person’s ideas to life. We can regard the cost, effort and challenge of delivery not as a drag on the job, but as an essential part of the job. We can move work from the ‘obstacles’ column to the ‘work to be done’ column – before we move it to the ‘in progress’ and ‘done’ columns.

However, given that the list of work to be done is long, and so is the list of things that could go wrong, our optimism cannot be unadorned. A simple hope that everything is going to be okay is what leads us to cut corners, to condense testing cycles, to under resource the team, to put off the backup and failover arrangements until later. There are many opportunities in technology projects to turn optimism into recklessness.

Perhaps what we need can be termed applied optimism: an attitude founded in expertise and an orientation towards problem solving, which looks clear eyed and undaunted at all the different potential modes of failure and thinks, ‘I’m sure we can figure out a way around that.’  Perhaps that is what that project manager thought he saw in me all those years ago.

I don’t know whether I have successfully lived up to that expectation, or retained the attribute of applied optimism through my career: despite a few more decades of experience, I cannot claim to have learnt perfect self-awareness. But I have learnt that, despite their dour and grumpy appearance, many technology teams have an engrained streak of applied optimism, even if it is buried deeply. If it wasn’t there, then it is hard to see how they could ever summon the energy to attempt to build anything.

Perhaps part of the job of leaders to bring that applied optimism to the surface, to express confidence that with effort, expertise and persistence, we can achieve remarkable things. It is not simply to be the sunny, bland voice of positivity, but to remind the team of what they are capable of, what they can do, and why they do it.