DORA and your uncle Joe
I should know better than to get into conversations about politics with people whose opening statements include four factual inaccuracies presented as gospel.
DORA has no appetite to understand why your selective facts are better than the whole truth
And I should know better than to enter conversations about technology with people who start their sentences with “you don’t understand”.
Because they have two things in common, these conversations and these people.
Firstly, they are not about what they are about.
If you actually have the conversation, you will spend an hour you won’t get back saying words about facts but really talking about emotions with people who have made a choice… and then put an explanation on it. Like a hat. And they don’t want to talk about their feelings, the emotive reasons that led them to make whatever decision they made. No sir. They want to talk about their facts. Not facts. Their facts. The facts that suit their feelings. Like a hat.
The second thing these conversations have in common is that they are manifestations of the fact that most people are very good at dealing with complexity in the abstract or at a distance but when complicated thoughts come close to home and threaten to rearrange the furniture of their own mental landscape… then complexity is unwelcome.
But since we can’t say that without looking ignorant we will dismiss it as wrong or not applicable in this situation. This is not entirely true but it is altogether more comfortable, so there.
The problem is… it’s an election year in, like, seven countries? Probably more. So… many of us will find ourselves at a dinner table opposite uncle Joe who is very keen to explain to you why his choice to vote a certain way is not just right… but logically sound.
And maybe you can avoid uncle Joe.
Maybe you can make sure you sit far away from him, don’t take the bait or ensure you never get invited back by calling him a wilful ignoramus after the fourth time he cites a nonsense as fact, you counter and he moves on to the next thing pretending they are all interchangeable.
Because uncle Joe has a preference and would like that preference to be treated as true, thank you very much. It’s only your opinions that are subjective, didn’t you know?
We all have an uncle Joe or ten. It may be your friend’s partner, your neighbour, your colleague. It may be your boss and the conversation may be eerily similar and yet not about politics. Because the same mechanism of recoiling from complexity when it gets too close to the familiar is playing itself out in offices the world over.
Uncle Joe style, we are capable of understanding complexity out there… but the closer it gets to our existing business, existing operating model, existing ways of working… the more likely we are to explain it away, cherry-pick and end up with explanations that sound compelling but are stretched, over-generalised and selective. They are fundamentally… not entirely true. Although they contain enough truth to sound plausible and be comforting in their snug fit with our preferred worldview.
Uncle Joe will justify his political beliefs like that, in the same way your CTO will justify why there are compelling reasons for the modernisation he is not undertaking. The risks he is deferring. The can he is kicking down the road. The reasons sound sound. His reasons are actually important considerations. They are just not… reasons.
He says things about migration risk and resilience testing and system amortisation schedules. He says things that are true and sound sensible but when stacked up they don’t add up to where he is trying to get to. Your CTO, not uncle Joe. Although… also uncle Joe.
“I don’t like this” is the strongest emotional driver humans ever experience. It determines most of what we do. Sometimes we call it. Sometimes we pretend there is analysis at work. Sometimes the analysis comes after the fact and it proves our instinct. Glory be.
Sometimes it comes after the fact and shows that we are just scared or lazy and actually the thing we are rejecting because we don’t like it, is not how we perceive it. We are wrong in our analysis and therefore not informed in our choice.
Then what?
Do we follow the evidence to a different choice? Do we double down on the choice saying, “sod it, this is what I choose for reasons that may not be lofty but are true”… because fear is a reason. A powerful one.
Or do we ignore the facts that don’t suit and shout louder?
Well… it depends.
When it comes to uncle Joe, then… probably the latter. You’d be amazed how resilient he is when it comes to bending the facts to suit his preference.
But when it comes to work?
Every decision dodged… every corner cut… everything we didn’t do because it was uncomfortable and a little scary and not how we would have preferred it? Every uncle Joe moment that added to our operational complexity, legacy estate and technical debt. Every decision we dodged because it was too complicated to think it through, too many variables, too many risks… every single thing we didn’t do and explained away is still there. Just like the facts uncle Joe ignores.
Still there.
Only unlike uncle Joe, our organisations have to reckon with the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).
22,000 organisations and counting, to be precise, that will have to look at their technology estate and their partnerships estate… the choices they did or didn’t make… and nobody will care for their reasons and their preferences and their preferred facts. DORA is a great leveller. Do the choices you made increase your resilience and stability? Or do your choices create risks that may jeopardise the stability of the entire edifice?
Did you allow complexity to accumulate around your preferred configuration of facts, systems and activities or did you tackle it head on? Does the complex thinking you avoided in order to retain things that were comfortable create complexity you now need to account for?
Did you add new technology to your estate without streamlining your operating model, because it was too complicated? (Enter left, the chorus of “you don’t understand”).
Did you accumulate technology operating to different release cycles and SLAs, different resiliency testing expectations and with slightly different risk modelling to boot?
Did you deal with partners and vendors over here… homegrown systems over there and governance yonder?
Did you, at times find that bringing everything together and thinking it all through to its logical conclusion was complicated, scary and would really challenge the fundamentals of how your organisation is set up today and sort of baulked away from some of those hard conversations choosing instead to believe you don’t need to/have time/doesn’t apply to you (delete as appropriate)?
Did you, ultimately, allow uncle Joe to make some of your technology decisions?
DORA can’t help you with the dinner time conversations, I’m afraid, but it will put a line through all the “you don’t understand” lamentations at work once and for all.
Because DORA has no appetite to understand why your selective facts are better than the whole truth… and neither do I, uncle Joe.
#LedaWrites
Leda Glyptis is FinTech Futures’ resident thought provocateur – she leads, writes on, lives and breathes transformation and digital disruption.
She is a recovering banker, lapsed academic and long-term resident of the banking ecosystem.
Leda is also a published author – her first book, Bankers Like Us: Dispatches from an Industry in Transition, is available to order here.
All opinions are her own. You can’t have them – but you are welcome to debate and comment!
Follow Leda on X @LedaGlyptis and LinkedIn.
