War and Peace
There’s a book called ‘Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia’ by Orlando Figes.
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Skipping to the juicy bits isn’t a strategy. It is not even an option.
It came out while I was doing my PhD and would be entirely irrelevant to my life if it wasn’t for the fact that it appeared on the reading list of one of my obligatory seminars.
Those seminars are there to make sure PhD students come out of their caves occasionally to visit other people’s caves. They were not meant to make us rounded humans, in case you are wondering. They were, rather, meant to help our minds not get stuck in our own topic too badly. On a good day, they were meant to inspire and energise.
Mostly they were a nuisance, but… you know. Needs must.
As it turns out, it was good preparation for life in the office. A lot of meetings that were meant to achieve one thing but failed miserably and were mostly a nuisance lurked in my professional future and I didn’t even know it.
Anyway.
Back to my seminar, and the time we ended up having a hilariously disjointed conversation about Natasha’s dance.
Not the book. But the actual dance the book is named after. Literally. The dance that Natasha danced that inspired the title.
If you have no idea what I am talking about, you would have been in good company at the seminar.
Because most of the people in the room had no idea what the reference was. Most of them had no idea because they had never read War and Peace. Some had no idea because, having read the book, they didn’t remember the bit where Natasha brings the worlds of the refined aristocracy and the Russian peasants together in a dance.
I am pretty sure I skipped that part, truth be told.
Which is where the hilariously disjointed conversation took place. The bits those of us who had read the book had skipped. You see, we found ourselves in a hilarious conversation entirely at cross purposes between those of us who had read War and Peace.
Because, to listen to us, we had read entirely different books.
On the one side, myself and two French chaps. We remembered the descriptions of glitz and pomp. We remembered the war. Sure. We didn’t really remember the peace part. But we totally remembered the love story. And also the whole, “Wait, is a count better than a prince?” calculations.
On the other side, three people who had gone to school in the last years of the USSR and were like, “What love story?”.
Turns out, they had read the book at school and their teachers had mostly skipped ahead to the war parts. We had also read it at school, but our teachers mostly skipped away from the war parts. None of us remember Natasha dancing in a meaningful way other than the odd cotillon at a ball with a prince or a baron or a count. Whatever is better.
We were reading the same book.
Only we weren’t.
Which is how I feel when I have conversations with people about DORA. Gotcha, didn’t I? You totally didn’t expect this little segue.
But seriously.
The regulation document itself is a bit of War and Peace if you think about it.
It is long, complicated, epically wide-ranging and, depending on your interests… sure, there are boring bits that I am sure all of us have been tempted to skip, skim and jump over.
So, I do wonder, at times, if we have done exactly that.
Because DORA is here (I know you know because the memes of ‘happy DORA day to those who celebrate’ were all over my LinkedIn feed and, I’m assuming, yours too). DORA is here. We anticipated it. We dreaded it. We talked about it a lot.
We prepared for it… maybe. And now it’s here. And now… what?
I speak to a lot of people who are like ah, yeah, sure, whatever, DORA, someone in my organisation is doing the thing.
I also speak to a lot of folks who won’t admit it in polite company but privately they concede that they are quietly risk-accepting and waiting to see whether the promise of deregulation in the US means that the European regulator will take their foot off the accelerator on this… or not… and whether the fact that nobody will be DORA-compliant in any real sense any time soon means the regulator will drag out timeframes and hand out remediation plans and candy.
In pockets, people are taking it very seriously and at least two of the smaller governments in the EEA are asking their infrastructure providers to do extensive scenario planning on what resilience looks like if we lose… you know… the internet… for an extended period of time due to hot conflict or hostile meddling from abroad.
Speaking of the extremes…
I am sitting in the UK listening to the government’s absolute commitment to be a leading light in the adoption of AI and exasperated journalists trying to highlight all the things that need to happen for that to be true, all the things that need to be true for the things to happen, and all the things that would need to change for any economy to leap enthusiastically into an AI everything future.
Meanwhile, the futurists have already moved to quantum.
AI is so last year.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but you can’t skip ahead. You can’t skip the boring bits. You can’t skip the gristly bits. You can’t even skip the bit where Natasha does a dance literally none of us realised was symbolically charged and significant.
Whether you like the war part or the love story part best, you have to wade through the rest. Wade, not skip. That’s the assignment.
You have to digest the information.
You have to do the work.
We are all still cleaning up our API-first mindset more than a decade into the adoption of the regulatory framework that forced us (let’s admit it, it’s OK: we are among friends) and more than a decade since they’ve existed. I mean, come on. The idea originates in the 1940s. Evolution has taken its time. Adoption also.
And that matters.
AI is no different. The ideas underpinning the work have been evolving for decades.
Oh and… for the record… quantum has been evolving for longer than you think and will be evolving for longer than you are happy to invest in.
And that is the point. The things coming our way are overwhelming, complicated and demand a lot of us. But our attention span isn’t helping. As an industry, we seem to be forever looking for shortcuts even though they have historically not worked well for anyone.
And yes, it’s a lot.
DORA is a lot. The fact that DORA isn’t even top of the list we are losing sleep over is, in itself, a lot.
But the ones scenario-planning for the catastrophic incidents we all hope don’t happen are the ones who understood the assignment.
The ones working out the dependencies around regulation, legislation, data retention, technology and global competitive tensions are the people who are really leaning into AI even if they come across as curmudgeonly naysayers. They are the ones doing the work.
I know it’s a lot. And there will be more of it constantly and relentlessly. But that’s the assignment.
And if you don’t want to do it, then of course there is the option to do something else.
But if you decide to stay, skipping to the juicy bits isn’t a strategy. It is not even an option.
#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.