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From The Hollow Men:

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar …

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

– T.S. Eliot

Assume, for a moment, that the world we want to live in can’t exist without freedoms and democratic institutions that in turn depend on informed citizens.

If you agree this is an essential precondition for a desirable society then you also have to agree we all need trustworthy sources of information.

Not just sources we trust. That comes later. First they have to be trustworthy.

I first wrote about the need for trusted information providers and how the Internet exacerbates the challenge of recognizing them more than two decades ago in InfoWorld (read “Trusted Information Providers,” 3/17/1997, although I didn’t draw the proper distinction between trusted and trustworthy.)

There isn’t yet a Trusted Information Provider seal, but we’ve reached the point where we need one desperately — not only as citizens but in our roles as IT and business managers and professionals. As evidence, I offer “Hoax attempts against Miami Herald augur brewing war over fake, real news,” (Tim Johnson, McClatchy DC Bureau, 2/24/2018).

Briefly, an Internet imposter posed as Alex Harris, a Miami Herald reporter. The imposter issued offensive tweets spoofed so Mr. Harris appeared to be their source. Another imposter, or possibly the same one, created a phony and equally offensive Miami Herald story by Mr. Harris, using screen shots indistinguishable from legitimate Miami Herald articles, and distributed them through Twitter and Snapchat.

I can think of only three reasons someone might do this. (1) They might be taking advantage of our increasing tribalism to discredit those on the other side of the issue being reported on. (2) They might be trying to discredit the mainstream media by making it appear to be disgusting. Or, (3) they might be going a step further, fostering distrust of any information we read because we can never trust that the source is who or what it claims to be.

Their motivations don’t really matter, though. The inevitable outcome is to further increase our tribalism and to contribute to the increasing distrust of the sources of information we’re accustomed to relying on.

When I first wrote about the need for a Trusted Information Provider certification body I was thinking in terms of whether a given information provider adhered to trustworthy information gathering and vetting practices.

The stakes are higher now. We need some means for validating that the information we encounter does come from its purported source.

For general news I can offer a short-term solution: Stop getting any of it from the Internet. It’s easy to fake up a page that looks like the source is CNN, Fox, or any major online newspaper. It’s much harder, not to mention more expensive, to print a fake newspaper and distribute it to hundreds of thousands of doorsteps.

Which in turn isn’t as hard as hijacking a cable channel to send out truly fake news.

But that doesn’t solve the problem. In your professional life you also rely on information providers. Only there’s a very good chance you have no print publications available to you. No matter your field … IT, marketing, finance and accounting, human resources, or what have you, printed magazines are as it were, pretty much yesterday’s news.

And it isn’t just general-purpose trade publications that are at risk. Think about information publishers like Gartner and Forrester. If you receive information from them you receive it electronically.

And if you receive it electronically it can be counterfeited.

We need something that reverses the usual order of things. If you subscribe to, for example, the Washington Post, you occasionally have to log in — to authenticate yourself so as to have access to the information it publishes.

What we need is a reliable mechanism for Trusted Information Providers to authenticate themselves to us.

I once helped a client become PCI compliant. The company was owned and managed by members of a tightly knit community. So when the time came to institute background checks, the CEO was incensed. “Background? I know my employees’ parents and grandparents! I was there when a lot of them were born! I’m a guest at their weddings! Why do I need background checks?”

When we were all truly tribal, proving you were who you said you were took no more effort than showing your face.

Not anymore.

Now, proof of identity just might be the central challenge of our age.

Gravity, according to Sir Isaac Newton, is a force. Einstein’s general relativity describes it as curvature of the space/time continuum.

In the world of business, process is a matter of some gravity, and not only in the sense that it’s important. Gravity is why maintaining a healthy level of process so difficult.

With process, as with garlic, Vitamin A, and Will Farrell, more is not necessarily better. All, Will Farrell excepted, are examples of moderation being the right target.

Imagine an organization with no sense of process. It’s the ultimate results-oriented environment. Employees “do what makes sense,” based on the exact circumstances each faces, their mood, training, experience, and how each did a similar piece of work yesterday. The organization has no institutional memory, no consistency, and little ability to learn and improve.

Call it chaos.

Now imagine a different organization — one with lots of process. There’s a process for accepting work, for setting priorities, for determining how each and every task and responsibility is to be performed, and how to build a salad from the salad bar in the cafeteria. In this organization, employees don’t really evaluate situations. They mostly apply whichever policy or procedure seems least likely to get them into trouble. All that matters is following the steps. Results are the last thing on their minds.

It’s both the definition and root cause of bureaucracy.

Neither chaos nor bureaucracy is a desirable state for an organization. They are, however, desirable states for different sorts of employee.

Chaos is fun, exciting, and unpredictable — enjoyable for those with a sense of adventure and a low boredom threshold. Too bad it doesn’t work all that well once the work expands to a point where more than three people have to handle similar responsibilities.

Bureaucracy is stifling, choking, and delivers poor results, but for employees who don’t like to take risks and like coloring inside the lines it’s safe and secure. It has, however, the unfortunate downside of putting the entire business at risk.

Which is where gravity comes into the picture. Except that unlike physical gravity, which results from the curvature of space and time that occurs in the presence of mass, organizational gravity results from the curvature of preference that occurs in the presence of a mass of like-minded employees.

You can visualize the situation as a hill. The two plains flanking it on either side are chaos and bureaucracy. The peak in the middle is a healthy level of process that helps employees work more effectively while allowing them the flexibility they need to adapt to different circumstances.

If you, as a process-oriented sort of person, want to institute this moderate level of process in a chaotic organization you’ll be fighting gravity all the way. To the employees who enjoy things the way they are, you’re trying to make their work more bureaucratic and they’ll resist. Were you to stop pushing the organization up the process hill, gravity would pull it back down to chaos.

But you persist, and finally reach the top of the hill, achieving the optimum level of process moderation. You are to be congratulated — not many managers achieve this transformation. And so, satisfied, you rest.

At which point gravity takes over, pulling the organization down the other slope of the hill, turning it into a bureaucratic quagmire.

The same dynamic takes over if you start from the other side, too. Bureaucracy busting is hard and thankless (but worthwhile) work as anyone who has tried to do it will tell you. It can be done but it requires relentless attention, boundless energy, and usually a change in personnel as well.

If you push the organization up the process hill in this direction, to try to get it back into balance, you’ll also end up fighting gravity: Stop for just a few moments and it will roll right back down. Bureaucracies are notoriously self-perpetuating.

Whether you start with chaos or bureaucracy, if you stop too early the organization will fall back to where you started. Push too long, on the other hand, and it will keep on rolling, down the other side, to an end-state that’s just as undesirable as the one you started with.

As is so often the case, maintaining a sense of balance, which is the most desirable place to be, also requires the most ongoing effort and attention. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s due to gravity.

It’s built into the space/time continuum.