Soon to be "ex" X

We've all had the experience; a coffee shop staffed by frightened employees ducking in fear each time the manager barks the next round of orders. It's unpleasant for customers, and usually the fearful staff end up making a sub-par coffee, but we tolerate it in order to get our caffeine fix. 

What about that other coffee shop - the one with the friendly owner who welcomes everyone in and speaks kindly (but firmly, of course) to their team? The coffee always tastes good, doesn't it? And have you ever noticed after a few months or even years that the team hasn't changed much - it's mostly the same staff. Why? They feel secure in their workplace. They know they have a job to do and they do it efficiently, and usually they "go the extra mile" because they genuinely want to. They know the boss treats them kindly (but firmly - boundaries are important), so they WANT to perform better to please their boss. 

Sure it doesn't always work, and occasionally a less-than-honest employee might take advantage of what they incorrectly perceive as a "pushover" of a boss, but in my experience that type of employee doesn't work well in any workplace, even with the strictest of bosses. So there really isn't a significant risk by leading with kindness - in fact there's so much to gain for everyone. 

At the moment, we're seeing an interesting series of events playing out at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the United States. We all owe them a lot, although most people are unaware they even exist. I'm certainly an advocate of efficiency (who isn't!) although I also firmly believe in leading with kindness. This month at CISA, we've seen over a hundred staff fired, then re-hired, and then "benched" on full pay, all in the name of efficiency. 

Now efficiency is important of course. I've been in situations in which many people have ended up scratching their heads wondering "how did this get so messed up!" And that's in all types of workplaces, not just in government. I recall one large corporate I worked for once reviewed a 100+ employee department only to find about three of them had no actual function - they just turned up each day, walked around and got paid for it. I've also seen an HR department take over a year to "work through the processes" to remove an employee who was actually sleeping at his desk. So I'm not for a moment suggesting we shouldn't try to be more efficient in everything we do. 

However, what if we led positive change with kindness? Rather than going in guns blazing,  Yosemite Sam style, what if we spent a few moments reviewing the situation? A friend of mine practices this in most things she does: take a breath, say "I just need a moment", conduct a three-month review, or whatever works for the present situation. I have often wondered if the Yosemite Sam Method (trademark pending) has been tabled in a management textbook, considering how frequently it's put in practice. "What's this thing my predecessor did? Who cares, rip it down because it wasn't my monument, dang it, and I want to build one! Me!" 

Some time ago, The Platform Previously Known As Twitter was made more efficient using a Kitchen Sink. Morale amongst the Twitter team plummeted, however The Kitchen Sink was able to demonstrate efficiency by reducing the size of Twitter's workforce and reducing expenditure. Fast forward a couple of years and we recently observed the 'X' platform exhibit some instability back at the beginning of this month. 

It was loudly proclaimed at the time that this was the result of a "massive cyber attack" from the Ukraine. Experts quickly pointed out that denial of service attacks, particularly distributed ones like the one which targeted 'X', happen frequently and it's extremely difficult to attribute the attack to one threat actor, let alone a country. But the true facts simply didn't suit the political agenda playing out before us. 

Experts further identified that misconfigured servers at 'X' were the reason a relatively common event such as a denial of service was able to bring the service to its knees. In non-tech speak, organisations like X use a service which "scrubs" the Internet traffic, in theory removing the bombardment of illegitimate traffic that occurs during a denial of service attack, allowing the legitimate traffic to continue through and post tweets or purchase goods and services, whatever the service is supposed to do. In order to do that, the scrubbing service is quite literally put "in front" of the service it's protecting. As regular Internet users we don't notice this, our requests to post cat mishaps flow through the scrubbing service transparently. 

However the misconfiguration that occurred with 'X' recently was that (again in non-tech speak) bits of the 'X' service weren't actually placed behind the scrubbing service, they were just hanging out unprotected on the interwebs for the attackers to have their wicked way with. In other words, someone forgot to configure things properly. Think of putting the filter for the air conditioner only part of the way back in after you've taken it out to clean it, instead of pushing it all the way in and closing the lid. Some of the air might get filtered, but a lot of it will just go around the filter directly into the air conditioner. 

That's human error, but it's a pretty big one - and it involves technology that's been around for about twenty years now - it's not something new that techies don't know yet. Could this error have been the result of stressed-out employees operating in fear? Could it be that there aren't sufficient employees remaining at 'X' to operate all the levers, wheels and widgets at the giant tweet factory? What if, just what if, the overlords at 'X' had treated their employees with kindness over the recent couple of years rather than deploying the Yosemite Sam Method? Would this month's 'X' service outage still have happened? Or would the employees have been more careful configuring their systems? 

I suppose we'll never know. But one thing is for certain: I want to buy another coffee from this cafe I'm sitting in, because the owners treat their staff and customers with kindness - and guess what? The coffee tastes fantastic!