Circuit Breakers

On October 19,1987 I was sitting at my desk in California when a colleague called from Chicago.  

“Have you seen the market news?” he asked.

“No...but I’m looking now”

“It’s fallen 20% and counting…”

I pulled up my market application on my PC and stared in disbelief.[1]

There were a variety of factors that caused the crash of ‘87.[2]  One was program trading, computer programs used by hedge funds and others to execute groups of trades directly and rapidly.  

In response to the crash, regulators developed policies known as “circuit breakers” so that stock exchanges could halt trading when large swings in prices crossed a threshold. They were essentially alert systems that watched the trading systems and took rapid action to pause. This temporarily stopped the chaos and allowed people to step in and restore order.

The metaphor of a circuit breaker comes from the common electrical circuit box in many homes.  If you’ve ever experienced a power outage, you know that sometimes running the toaster, dishwasher, and a space heater in the kitchen can overload the electrical circuit, cause the breaker-switch to “pop” and turn off the flow of current to that room.  That’s the breakers purpose: to stop the electricity flow from increasing to the point of burning up the wires (or the house!) And, as a colleague pointed out, the tripped circuit breaker is an important indicator that something went wrong that needs attention.

It’s evident why the circuit breaker name stuck for the “trading curb” systems that the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) put in place following the market crash.[3]  I believe this is a useful metaphor for the current day and the concerns about runaway artificial intelligence (AI) programs.  

The key feature of this metaphor is that a rapid overload in the wrong direction can be automatically halted so human beings can step in to correct things.  It also implies a dash of humility and avoids the hubris of insisting we can build the failsafe system.

This is not fundamentally different from the “endless loop” interrupt or bottom of an else-if chain in programs.[4]  The graceful exit when unexpected situations occur is good design, as is the expectation that the system will at some point fail.  Most programmers would pick an orderly shutdown over a system crash.  How the system fails is important. This same expectation needs to temper our AI designs.  Self-healing and machine learning systems aside, a key interrupt in systems needs to be the human judgment interrupt.

What I’m suggesting is that our AI systems should be designed and programmed with this feature in mind.  When a system starts to cross a threshold that we’ve agreed is dangerous, the system halts and asks for some human judgment.  Defining those thresholds and boundaries may be hard work and such standards may be elusive, but as has been said in other realms, “I’ll know it, when I see it.”  The point is if we build the need for human judgment pauses into our systems --human interrupts, if you will, we just may avoid the system barreling forward at great speed and potential damage.

_______________

[1] At the time, I was Client Marketing Director for Lotus Signal, a PC-based real-time stock market application.  Lotus bought Dataspeed in 1985 primarily to get this technology.
[2] See the discussion in Wikipedia on “Black Monday (1987)”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1987) .  Also see “Algorithmic Trading,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_trading

[3] See “Trading Curbs”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_curb

[4] The story I heard when learning to code was about the software engineer who put at the end of an exhaustive else-if chain the message “this can’t happen.” which of course was displayed one evening as the program merrily ran.  

"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."

A Tale of Two Resumes

I review many students' resumes each semester, as part of the IT Leadership & Management course I teach, as an advisor to students immersed in career planning, and as a practitioner who has interviewed and hired many candidates.  The conversations that result convince me that having two resumes may help in your career search.

The first may be formatted to ease the AI review by an increasing number of applicant tracking system (ATS) apps HR departments are using to sort thru the many applicants.  This is often playing the game of matching phrases in your resume with keywords in the job description. For an interesting article on this, see beat the robots.

The second resume may apply more marketing intelligence to make your uniqueness pop. Since I arrived at UMSI, I've been encouraging the use of "about me" sidebars, and highlighting the impact you had in each job, as well as what you learned. As a manager, I care less about what you did than about the difference you made--on the organization as well as yourself.  For some interesting (some off-the-wall) and memorable designs, see the Piktochart site.  Start with the tamer #24, 40 and 44 for some ideas.

These two approaches may be two ends of the spectrum, but they recognize that (a) you are more than a collection of keywords, and (b) in a crowd of applications, standing out takes some creativity.


"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."

Working Backwards

One of the hardest things for technology people to do is be succinct, replace the details with a story about benefits, and to ask for the sale.  After all, isn't this what marketing and sales people do?  Perhaps it's a surprise, but that is what you need to do if you hope to get a technology project, new product or new way of doing business, approved by a senior management team.

And please be brief!  It's not that senior managers have short attention spans, they need to get to the bottom line and make a decision.  Your job is to help them do that.

Each semester, I ask students to prepare a presentation for a mock senior management team.  Masters students know how to do the research and write the effective paper.  The goal of a senior management presentation is different.  It's about making the "ask," the bottom line decision you need them to make to proceed, and that's based on how much it will cost, how long it will take and how many people we need to commit to do it. Along the way, it's good to identify the benefits we will realize, the risks the organization will be taking to do this, and how you plan to mitigate those.  All of this should take less than 15 minutes with 10 slides plus Q&A.

Senior managers will want to know you are competent (what are your credentials and have you done this before) and that you've done your homework.  The 30-page report is impressive; it's not likely anyone will read it... beyond the executive summary.

A student team did a fine job talking about their research and the conclusions of their study.  When it came time for the Q&A, the CEO said, rather bluntly, "What the hell are you asking me to do?"  That's not the likely response to a presentation in an academic environment.  But it is what you should expect from a CEO, whether from a corporation or nonprofit organization.

A CEO told me once, "I can't use the students schools a graduating today; it takes me too long to retrain them."

"Retrain them how," I asked?

"To be able to talk with customers, manage a project with a diverse and dispersed team, and get to the bottom line of things!"

So to learn effective presentations, we start with the bottom line and work backwards.  That way, we are keeping the end goal in mind.  Here are ten slide headlines for a hypothetical project, in reverse order from an approved and funded proposal:

1. The ask - what Senior Management Team decision are you asking for?
2. Time and cost - how much time will it take to complete your project proposal and at what cost (one-time and recurring)?
3. Risks - what risks are there to your project's success and what are the mitigations you see?
4. Benefits - what benefits accrue from going with your recommendations; what's the value proposition?
5. Your recommendation - Among the options, which are you recommending?
6. Options - what are the alternatives you studied and the pros and cons of each
7. Approach/method taken - how did you go about your investigation, sources consulted, tested conducted, etc.
8. Assumptions made - what is the scope that you narrowed, what is your scenario?
9. Problem - what problem are you trying to solve? what are the key questions you are trying to answer? 
10. Intros - who are the members of your team and what are your credentials?

Everything else may be important, but it is appendix.  Now reverse the order.  Go.


"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."

BLIND SPOTS: When it Comes to Data, it’s About the Conversation

The following post was initially posted on LinkedIn.

During my 40 years in IT management, I often encountered people who were great computer scientists. But they couldn’t hold a business conversation with a group, let alone senior managers. We often had to provide special coaching to teach these bright, dedicated professionals how to describe technical opportunities in “normal” English.

This inability of IT professionals to have consultative conversations is a common problem in business --and it’s likely to get worse.

As we journey further into the data-driven age, corporations are facing a looming shortage of university graduates trained in data science. That alone is a concern.

Meanwhile, those who already are, or soon will be, working in the corporate world may be able to speak fluent algorithm and statistics -- but they can’t explain how they use data to their non-data-science colleagues responsible for strategic planning, training, reports, sales, and so on.

This forms a gap between technical skills and communication/consultative skills in the workplace. It is a disconnect between data science-speak and soft skills that are basic to business life. I call this disconnect “blind spots.”

As an IT professional and a now a faculty member at the University of Michigan School of Information (UMSI), I am keenly interested in this growing problem, which can affect graduates’ marketability as much as the corporate bottom line. In fact, addressing these gaps is key to my role at UMSI. Among my responsibilities, I teach a class on IT Leadership & Management

As I was preparing my curriculum last year, I attended a Gartner CIO Summit in Toronto. Gartner, Inc. is a leading research and advisory firm that focuses on technology.

It was the perfect place to talk about needs and gaps with CIOs and their trusted advisors. One comment provides the economic context: “The universities can’t graduate data scientists fast enough for the 10x growth in demand.”

Other comments I heard only added to this theme: "Technology is not the problem; people and culture are the challenge." CIOs need to hire “collaborative facilitators.” Data science students have the technology skills, but "they need to know executives’ questions before asking the questions of the data." “Data scientists are statistics magicians and super coders, but they lack domain (business) expertise.”

And finally: "Students need to learn compassion."

You get the idea.

These comments put things into some perspective. If the demand for data scientists is far outpacing the supply of new graduates, and the required skill set is becoming more consultative, something has to give. Salaries and starting bonuses may skyrocket, but that’s not going to meet the need. Neither is more tech skills.

Informed by all of this, I assigned to my master’s students this past year to prepare a corporate-style presentation of a technology-based project proposal and present it to a panel of senior manager volunteers. I wanted to test what I had been hearing.

The results were mixed. Some student teams struggled with a focused, executive-style presentation. Other teams were able to navigate it -- with some practice and coaching. Their biggest challenge was converting a conclusion into an “ask”—a call to action, decision and commitment from their audience.

In contrast, teams with students who had prior consulting or corporate world experience fared much better. That underscored my concern: Real-world experiences are doing a better job teaching the communications skills than educational institutions.

This means we educators need to figure out the best way to prepare students for the workplace. We have many excellent professors and guest speakers at U-M. I have sat in their classes and I have watched their online presentations. We often model the communication and consultative skills our students need.

We need to teach what we do well in the better classes we teach, on campus and in our online courses. We are passionate, animated and adept at getting new and even difficult concepts across to our audiences. We also know how to be consultants with our students. We are our own case studies. We need to be more explicit about how we do this, so that students learn not only by observing, but also by learning the theory behind good communication and then practicing it in business and other settings.

While it is essential to train students to code with the latest tools, we cannot neglect communication and negotiating skills, and even psychological sensitivity. Organizations should be able to require these skills rather than having to provide remedial training.

Meanwhile, if we want to teach the soft skills effectively, we need to take our own advice: Go to business leaders, analysts and academic designers for answers – and hold the kind of discussion we need to model for our students.

I look forward to the ensuing dialogue.

Edward Happ is Executive Fellow at the University of Michigan School of Information in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."

Hot Button Values

I was recently cleaning some old folders on my laptop to make room for the new.  (No matter the  model purchased, I always seem to run out of hard disk space.) I came across a memo that I updated from time to time for my team when I was CIO.  This edition is from 2006, when I was at Save the Children.  It still rings true for me, which means it's likely part of my values that endure across the years of  change.

Now that I'm teaching in the fall at U. of Michigan I thought I'd look at this through the lens of leading a class of students and research projects.  My sense is that it still applies.  What are your thoughts?

MEMORANDUM

To:           IS Managers

Date:       April 17, 2006

Subject:  Hot Buttons

What Gets Recognized and Rewarded? Here are my management and work values:

1) Work hard, with passion

• Enthusiasm and high energy are contagious

2) Be on-time

• Set deadlines and make them
• Raise the "red flag" early about projects running late
• Call, or email in advance, changes in your schedule
• Make up missed time, on the honor system
• Do what it takes to deliver results, with self-directed flex time as the guiding principle

3) Don't waste mistakes

• Screw-ups are OK; they're an opportunity to change and improve something
• Be able to say: 

          a) What went wrong,
          b) What you changed so it doesn't happen again,
          c) How you're going to be faster fixing it if it does occur again.

4) Say what you mean, do what you say

• Honesty and integrity are fundamental to a team; there can't be mutual trust without it
• Say what's on your mind (keeping problems inside is a good recipe for ulcers)

5) Take ownership

• Admit mistakes, take responsibility
• Say what you're going to do to improve
• “Sign-up" and commit to get things done

6) Propose solutions

• Identifying the problem is only half the job; “no problem identification without recommendation.”
• When you have a problem to solve, take time to think about and suggest possible solutions to discuss
• Avoid complain mode and "dive-bomb deliveries;" keep ownership of the problem.
• That way we problem solve as a team, instead of hosting a gripe party.

7) Be frugal

• Handle time and expense records as if they were your mother's checking account
• Look for a low cost solution that doesn't lose quality
• Travel as if it's your credit card and bank account

8) Continuous Improvement

• Everything can be better the next time
• Check your work for quality, accuracy --you are your own QA department!
• Take initiative to constantly learn new things

          o Build prototypes
          o Test hypotheses
          o Dig into things with some research and analysis
          o Have a "book-of-the-month" (CD, seminar, etc.) mentality

9) Think positive

• Look for the bright side, the silver lining, the prize at the bottom of the box
• The glass is not half-empty, it's half-full

10) Play hard

• Have fun with everything you do
• Foster a rich sense of humor (it's the best antidote for stress!)
• Play seriously - play is work: it's the key to innovation

11) Teamwork

• Respect your neighbor
• Hold inclusive meetings: every opinion counts
• Solicit all participants input; “no wall flowers!”

12) Bias for Action

• Meet, discuss, build consensus.... but then take action and “do something!”
• End every meeting with a clear understanding of who will do what by when
• Look for the pragmatic solution; “80% solutions are good enough.” “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
• Planning is good, but so is humility: “50% of what you need to know is learned by doing;” so get started!

13) Service orientation

• Take the time to help somebody get something done
• Take the time to teach - help others become self-sufficient
• Treat other departments as if they are your customers, as if they are writing your paycheck.

14) Servant Leadership

• The management pyramid is upside down - managers serve their people

          o Help remove obstacles
          o Champion causes up the line
          o Get people what they need to get the job done.

15) Keep Score

• “Teams that don't keep score are only practicing”
• Gather data, run the numbers, prove the difference, “move the needle” forward

Of these 15, my top "hot" buttons are these 4:

#1 Bias for Action

• Meet, discuss, build consensus.... but then take action and do something
• End every meeting with a clear understanding of who will do what by when
• Look for the pragmatic solution
• Keep score
• Deliver!

#2 Service orientation

• Take the time to help somebody get something done
• Take the time to teach - help others become self-sufficient
• Treat other departments, vendors and each other as if they are your customers

          o As if they are writing your paycheck

#3 Take ownership

• Admit mistakes, take responsibility
• Say what you're going to do to improve
• “Sign-up" and commit to get things done

#4 Play hard

• Have fun with everything you do
• Foster a rich sense of humor (it's the best antidote for stress!)
• Play seriously - play is work: it's the key to innovation (prototype everything)

"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."

The Digital Divide and Context

A few things happened in the past few days that surprised me.  First, was hearing that in Detroit, just 45 miles from the University of Michigan campus where I work, 40% of the population do not have access to the Internet[1].  For the past 15+ years, I’ve been focused on the digital divide in developing countries, places like sub-Sahara Africa.  Now it is an issue in my backyard.  How can that be? The age, class, and community differences for US Internet access have narrowed over the past 15 years.[2]  Is Detroit an American anomaly?

Second, at a conference on University of Michigan and Detroit programs, an anthropologist cited that Detroit has one of the largest populations of unbanked citizens in the US, 20%, nearly twice the national average of 11%.  That’s citizens without a checking or savings account[3].  It’s a cash culture; credit and ATM cards are a foreign currency.

The third surprise came from the presentations at the conference.  Surveys and solutions were all touting digital delivery.  “Didn’t that risk losing the voice and participation of the population they most wanted,” I asked?  The “best” answer I heard, “we should distribute more phones!”  One of the professors went so far as to tell us how the computer science teams always start with repeated meetings with stakeholders asking them what they wanted.  “Technology came later,” he said.

What I came away with was a sense that the gap was a mindset gap. We really don’t get the local context.  If your frame of reference is that technology is what gets applied, that it’s the way you do things, have we really heard our audience?  For a population that is not connected, does not use banks or credit cards, I’d like to hear more about the non-technical approaches—at least until the digital divide problems are solved, and that means solving the cost and value barriers, before we suggest the next best app or web site.   Perhaps we can learn from the successes and failures in sub-Sahara Africa.  Who would have thought?

---

[1] Jim Kerstetter, “A Digital Divide in Detroit,” The New York Times, May 23, 2016, here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/technology/a-digital-divide-in-detroit.html  and the companion article by Cecilia Kang, “Unemployed Detroit Residents Are Trapped by a Digital Divide,” The New York Times, May 22, 2016, here:  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/technology/unemployed-detroit-residents-are-trapped-by-a-digital-divide.html .  The latter cites the 2013 US Census Bureau data for the figure.

[2] The Pew Research Center Report, “Americans’ Internet Access: 2000-2015,” June 26, 2015, states “For other groups, such as older adults, those with less educational attainment, and those living in lower-income households, adoption has historically been lower but rising steadily, especially in recent years. At the same time, digital gaps still persist.” Yet the racial gap is less than 10%, with 84% of all American adults using the Internet.  Here: http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/06/26/americans-internet-access-2000-2015/

[3] This report supports the anthropologist's claim: Kasey Wiedrich, “New Data Reveals High Unbanked, Underbanked Rates in Localities across America,” CFED, December 3, 2015. Here: http://cfed.org/blog/inclusiveeconomy/new_data_reveals_high_unbanked_underbanked_rates_in_localities_across_america/

"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."

Connections for Good

Last week was the annual NetHope Summit.  It was also the US election.  I think that juxtaposition merits a closer look.  As humanitarians and conservationists we have learned to deal quickly and constructively with crises.  Here are three things we practice:

1) We go to where the crisis is.  When a disaster strikes, many of us are on planes heading to center of the storm within hours.  We carry equipment and know-how and are ready to help. Running for safety, shelter or solitude is not who we are.  We go to the fire.

2) We work together.  We know the strength of collaborating.  We do this with each other and especially with the the local people we serve.  We also work with a strong sensitivity to the local culture. Context matters to us.

3) We restore communications.  Connectivity is in our DNA.  People's need to communicate often rises above their need for food and shelter.  They need to know their loved ones are safe and to tell them they are safe.  They want to connect and help, and we help them do that.  We restore the voices of the broken and the lifelines of data.  We do not rest until citizens and responders alike are able to rejoin the conversation.

Imagine if we applied these principles at home, right now.  How might we behave differently?

"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."