I’m David Knott. I’ve been working in enterprise technology for over forty years and I’m still learning. This blog is based on mistakes, failures, lessons and some things I find interesting:
To lead others, it helps to understand yourself
The best questions are those which make you think. I had the chance to talk to a group of emerging leaders this week, and was intrigued to be asked the question of whether self-awareness was something I had consciously worked on in my own development as a leader.
The time it took me to come up with an answer might be taken as a signal that I’m not particularly self-aware. However, the truth is that self-awareness is something that I have consciously worked on throughout my career. I can say with confidence that in the very earliest stages of my career, as a young software developer, I was self-conscious (in the sense that I was painfully shy and uncomfortable in my own skin) but not particularly self-aware (in the sense that I had limited understanding of my own areas of strength and weakness, of what motivated me and what didn’t, and of what effect I had on others).
Risk Management: the often overlooked dimension of Digital Transformation
I have to confess that I’m not good at keeping New Year’s resolutions: I find it hard to change my behaviour on the basis of a single decision that happens to coincide with the end of the year. The ubiquity of broken New Year’s resolutions also seems to give me permission to break my own. But this year will be different! I’m going to try something that I hope will not be too hard and will be of some interest: to share some thoughts about Digital Transformation which have been bouncing around my head for a while - and through sharing them, give them form.
As these thoughts form, I expect they will almost fall into the classic people, process and technology triad. The one difference is that, when we talk about Digital Transformation, I think that we should talk about practices rather than processes. This might seem like a fine semantic point but, to me, a process is something that people follow (the process is in charge), whereas a practice is something that people do (the people are in charge). Practices seem to fit a world of autonomy, skill and expertise - people doing the work that cannot be done by machines.
If you’re going to land on the Moon, at some point you have to land on the Moon
The recording of the Apollo 11 Moon mission, just before the Eagle lands in the Sea of Tranquility, never fails to make my hair stand up. The tone of the astronauts is matter of fact, calm and professional: if you didn’t know the context then you would never imagine that they were engaged in one of humanity’s greatest endeavours.
And the more of the context you know, the more astonishing that air of calm becomes. Those last minutes before the landing were filled with alarms, unexpected behaviour from the lunar module, an overshoot of the planned landing site, and a search for a favourable place to land. By the time the module touched down, the craft had less than 5% of its fuel left, and was less than thirty seconds away from abandoning the mission. (This page gives a full transcript of the last 13 minutes before landing, and a great commentary on what was going on behind the words.)