How to cite this paper
Usdin, B. Tommie. “The high cost of risk aversion.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6, 2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Usdin01.
Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010
August 3 - 6, 2010
Balisage Paper: The high cost of risk aversion
B. Tommie Usdin
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.
B. Tommie Usdin is President of Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consultancy
specializing in XML and SGML. Ms. Usdin has been working with SGML since 1985 and
has been
a supporter of XML since 1996. She chairs the Balisage
conference and was co-editor of Markup Languages: Theory &
Practice published by the MIT Press. Ms. Usdin has developed DTDs, Schemas,
and XML/SGML application frameworks for applications in government and industry. Projects
include reference materials in medicine, science, engineering, and law; semiconductor
documentation; historical and archival materials. Distribution formats have included
print
books, magazines, and journals, and both web- and media-based electronic publications.
You
can read more about her at http://www.mulberrytech.com/people/usdin/index.html.
Copyright © 2010 by the author. Used with permission.
Abstract
Avoiding risk is not always the way to minimize risk.
Note: Editor’s Note
This talk was given in the opening session of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010.
Welcome to Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. I am delighted to see you all here.
This is — someone has probably already told you this — the biggest “Balisage” conference
ever. And I hope it will
be one of the best. I look forward to Balisage, even as I wonder what, if anything,
I can say in the opening
that will start the conference off on a the right tone.
They tell me I have to pick a topic ... they tell me ... that’s not
fair. I tell me that I have to pick a topic for my talk when we put the conference
program together, so I pick one, and then months later I have to turn that topic into
a talk. One of these years
I’m going to learn that when I pick my topic I should at least make notes on
what I think I’m going to talk about. When I sat down to write "The
High Cost of Risk Aversion" to open this conference, I thought, “I wonder what I thought
I
was going to talk about when I wrote that title. There are a lot of possibilities.”
I love conferences, and this conference in particular. I want your help with the culture
of
this conference. I want Balisage to be friendly and courteous. I want us to be able
to
respectfully disagree with things we all feel passionate about without being disrespectful
or
rude, without resorting to mudslinging or fisticuffs, even if that might feel appropriate.
What
did I just say? Don’t call anybody names and don’t hit anybody. Be
passionate but not personal. Challenge the ideas that a speaker has just presented,
the logic
behind the argument made, or the practicality of the proposals; question the approach,
background, and possibly even mastery of the facts. Don’t question the intent or the
character of the speaker. And, of course, do all questioning from the microphone,
please.
Is it necessary for me to tell you this? Well, it shouldn’t be. But we’ve had
a few people who were a little excessively passionate in previous years. So, one of
the kinds of
risks we take is really getting into it at Balisage.
I haven’t done it, have I? Avoiding risk is not always the way to minimize risk.
That’s still my topic, and it’s not what I’m talking about yet.
Alright, I’ll go farther. Avoiding risk is sometimes a way to maximize risk. And that
happens particularly, I think, in the technology area. As we become fearful what we
do is make
things worse, not better. And at least for this week at Balisage, I would like for
you to leave
some of your fears at home. Be willing to take some risks and to advocate risk-taking.
Let’s let go of arguing for perpetual backwards compatibility of everything all the
time
because it’s too risky to break anything. Let’s let go of advocating the safe path
all the time because it’s easy.
Be willing to take some risks yourself. For those of us who are consultants, I am
beginning
to believe that if you haven’t been fired from at least one consulting project for
advocating something that made your client sweat, you aren’t a very good consultant.
Okay, how many of you in the audience have ... no, I’m not going to ask. [laughter]
But I have.
You know, I’m not actually the conventional image of a risk-taker. (I do have a
mirror.) I’m short, and I’m fat, I’m on the trailing edge of
middle-aged, and I’m gray-haired. I could bore you for at least an hour with my medical
problems, and I don’t swear or spit or drink. But I do take risks — selected
risks. I think as a community we are taking too few risks right now, and I think we
should
reconsider that.
Some of those risks are personal. I was recently at a conference I had not previously
attended.
The topic was interesting; the program was interesting; the speakers included some
people whose works I had read and was quite impressed by; and the location was reasonably
convenient. So I went.
And when I got there, not too surprisingly, I didn’t see anybody I knew. (I
didn’t see anybody I knew until the second afternoon.) So, there I was,
surrounded by interesting people with whom I shared an interest but who I had never
met.
The least risky thing for me to
do, personally at least, was to mind my own business and sit in the corner and listen.
And the
shy child inside me (it is my opinion that EVERONE has a shy child inside them) wanted
to
do just that.
But I like conferences; I do conferences. I jumped in. At the first break, I got in
line to
get a cup of coffee, and I said to the person ahead of me in line, “What’s your
interest in ’name the topic of the conference’?” And she answered,
“I teach it,” and turned away, got her coffee, and walked away. Oh, well. That was
a failure.
So, now I have my cup of coffee, and I’m looking around the room, and there’s
a man on the edge of the crowd, not talking to anybody, watching what’s happening
in the room.
So, I walked over and stood next to him and said, “I don’t know a single person in
this room, do you?” And he said, “I know all the ones who matter.” before taking
a step away from me.
“Oh.”, I said.
[laughter] Well. This was not my morning.
I drank my coffee and I realized I had another couple of minutes, there
was still a line at the coffee machine, and, well, I needed something to get through
the day
with these friendly people, so I got back in that line, and I said to the woman in
front of me
“So, what’s the
most interesting thing you’re expecting on the program this afternoon?” And she
turned around and said, “I speak tomorrow.” [laughter] And then she said to the
person standing behind me, “Becky, how nice to see you!” She grabbed Becky's hand,
pulled her past me in line, and said, “Stand with me, so we can catch up.”
This really happened. Ouch. But you know what? I still wasn’t actually bleeding, and
I did attend the next two and a half days of the conference. Why am I telling you
all this
stuff? Is it because the next thing I’m going to tell you is: And the
next day I met the new love of my life, and I’ve just gotten back from six bliss-filled
weeks on a
Caribbean island, I’ve still got sand between my toes; it was wonderful. Well, no.
But I
did end up meeting a couple of people I will call if I have
questions on a particular topic. And I did learn a few things that were interesting
and will
possibly, even probably, prove useful in the future. It was not a waste of
time.
I would like for us at Balisage to have better manners that the people I have just
been describing.
I would like for us to assume,
unlike the people at that event, that if somebody is here, you probably do have an
interest in
common with them. They might be interesting to talk to, and blatantly snubbing them
is not only rude, it is
foolinsh because it deprives you of the opportunity to talk with someone you may find
interesting if not
professionally useful in the future. I would like for you to assume if you don’t know
anyone here
that your overtures to others will be welcomed, so you will take the risk of talking
to people. And if somebody you
don’t know startles you by starting to talk to you, I want you to think about how
you
would like to be treated in that position.
I used to say that managing life and work was a balancing act between three things
that are
in limited quantity, not only in my life, but in everyone’s life, those three things
being time, energy, and money. There’s never enough of any of them, and you can
frequently trade one for another. For example, I spend money on having the grass cut
at my
house. I could spend time and energy on it, but it’s a task I absolutely
despise, and there are things I can't pay to have someone do that I would rather do
with my energy and time.
And as
we do projects at work, we frequently also have the opportunity to balance time, energy,
and
money.
But I’ve actually left something important out of that equation; the real equation
is
time, energy, money, and risk. It never even occurred to me at my house, for example,
when my
furnace broke to replace the furnace myself. That was partly about time and energy
and money,
but it was also about risk. Why did the furnace need replacing in the first place?
Because it
had a cracked heat exchanger, and if I used it, it might fill the house up with carbon
monoxide
and kill the occupants. Why didn’t I replace that cracked heat exchanger, or stick
some duct
tape on it and hope all would be well? [laughter] Because it might then fill the house
up with carbon
monoxide and kill all the occupants!
I guess I’m very fortunate in that nothing that I do for work could actually kill
lots of people. But I can certainly do things that would waste a whole lot of time
and energy
and money, and have risks to balance in terms of each of those is used. When you start
thinking
about how you’re going to approach anything, including, for many of you in this room,
the way you are going to talk at this conference, think about the balance you are
discussing
between time, energy, money, and risk.
In a very important, as least important to me, sense, you are all risk-takers. You’ve
chosen to invest your time and energy and money and, to some extent, your reputations
in
Balisage, an event that is far from the center of any of your universes. I suspect
that for most, if
not all of you, if somebody were to say “What is the
conference in your field,”
this wouldn’t be it. It would be a conference on some subject matter; it would be
a
conference about aircraft or pharmaceuticals or libraries or whatever it is that you
really do
as opposed to how you do it, which is most of what brings us here. I want to make
sure you are
rewarded for the risks you have taken in coming to Balisage. Balisage is an event
at which we
are all allowed — maybe encouraged — to think about and talk about our ongoing
work, to talk about what we could do better and what we can’t do at all and what we
want
to do and what we want not to do. This is a place where we can talk about things that
don’t work and things that we may not want.
If you’re here, it’s likely that you feel as I do about people telling me what
I can do and what I can think about. A few years ago — quite a few years ago now —
I was doing work in my kitchen, and one of the things I needed to do was buy a new
oven. And I
walked into an appliance store and said to the salesman, “Do you have an oven with
these
three features?” I don’t even remember what they were. And he said to me,
“Women don’t want that.” And I stopped and thought about it for a moment
and said, “I’m going to walk out of this store, and then I’m going to walk back
in, and I’m going to ask the same question, and you’re going to give me a civil
answer.” I walked out of the store, and I waited a minute, and I walked back in and
looked at a very confused salesman and said, “Do you have an oven with these three
features?” And he said, “I’m not aware of any manufacturers who make
that.” Okay, that’s a fair answer. And at that point, I was willing to
have a conversation with him about what was available and what I could buy and ended
up buying
something.
That was not a unique experience. I also remember a time, actually not so long ago,
when I
called the user support line for some software I use on a regular basis and said,
“I
can’t figure out how to do .... This is what I’m trying to accomplish.” And
the person on the other end of the telephone said, “You don’t want to do
that.” Now, in fact, I did want to do that! What he really meant was “Our software
can’t support that.” And after a little questioning/negotiation, we finally
established that and established that we didn’t really need to discuss what I wanted;
we
needed to discuss what this tool would allow me to do and how. I ended up with an
acceptable
workaround and filing an enhancement request. I don’t actually know whether enhancement
requests to this particular vendor go anyplace but the circular file, but at least
they asked
for it. And that helps. At Balisage, I hope none of us are going to be told “We
don’t want that.” We may be told that nobody knows how to do it.
Daniel Shorr — how many of you know who Daniel Shorr was? Okay, many of the North
Americans and nobody else. Daniel Shorr was a reporter and a news analyst and a free
speech
advocate; a radio commentator, a newspaper reporter, a television
reporter — Daniel Shorr was one of my heroes. (I don’t have a lot of heroes.)
He died recently so I’ve been reading or re-reading some of his work. One of the things
he said seems appropriate. He said:
There are today more pressures than ever to conform, to avoid rocking the boat. I’m
prone to advise at least once in your lifetime take a risk for a principle you believe
in even
if it brings you up against your bosses.
And he said:
It really is true that I would sometimes stand up for a principle at the risk of my
job.
But he was honest. He also said:
It is also true that when I lose my job, I get terribly nervous.
I think those are some things to think about. And I am not telling you when you go
home you
should tell your boss that you really are not interested in how many steps his granddaughter
took last weekend, or how much fun your supervisor had on her vacation in Iowa City
or Eindhoven
or wherever she went. Nor am I suggesting that you insist on getting your way on everything
all
the time, but rather pick your battles and know what’s important. And take this time
at
Balisage to think about what’s important in the technology we work on.
I know some people who have a lot of very important data. What do I mean by “a
lot”? Well, when they talk about things you can count, the unit is usually millions.
How
many documents? It’s in the millions. How many searches? It’s in the millions. How
many users? It’s in the millions. They have a lot of data,by
anybody’s count, they’ve got a lot of data.
And what do I mean by “their data is important”? Well, not only does their
organization live off their data, if they and their data cease to exist, there are
a whole lot
of other people and a whole lot of other organizations who would be seriously disaccommodated
and who would have to scramble to find some way to meet this need. So, they have a
lot of data
that a lot of people think is important. And they have a fifteen-year-old — well,
almost
twenty-year-old — data lifecycle architecture. Not all the pieces of it are twenty
years
old, but the way they handle their content is between fifteen and twenty years old.
And they have a group — I think they call it a “team,” but maybe
it’s a “task force” or a “committee”; it’s one of
these organizational things — looking into new storage options because they’re
having a hard time serving their data fast enough for their users. And they’re looking
toward getting a big, fancy, new database of the same sort that they’ve already got;
only
this one will be bigger and better and faster and newer. And the brochure has the
word
“XML” in it to plug into this architecture and solve all their problems. And most
of this task force thinks that’s the right answer because the thing that’s slow is
serving the documents, and if they get a bigger, better, faster database, all will
be well. And
if they get the same kind of database they already have, then all of their training
will still
be good, and they will still be valuable to the organization because they know how
to work in this
environment, and it is the least risky thing they can do, and it will solve the problem.
Fortunately, they have an irritant on their task force, and this irritant keeps saying
to
them, “That’s not safe.” “What do you mean, it’s not
safe?” “We have to look at the whole lifecycle; we have to look at receipt and
validation and storage and maintenance and archiving and all the things we do with
our documents
before it makes sense to just replace one component of this architecture.” And my
friend
(my friend is that irritant, wouln't you know)
is hearing, “That’s really risky; that’s going to be really disruptive.
It’s going to touch everybody in the organization if we do that; we can’t do
that,” to which my friend is arguing, “If you don’t do that, the whole
thing may crash. If we don’t look at the whole system, when we remove the bottleneck,
we
may create a whole bunch of new bottlenecks, and the whole thing may break, besides
which this
organization does not have the stamina to sustain two major system changes in ten
years. And if
we use up our once a decade major system change on a logically-minor upgrade, we then
can’t fix
anything else. The least risky approach is very dangerous.” I’m not sure how this
is going to come out. I know who I’m cheering for.
We at Balisage are the people who can, should, and often do speak up and say, “The
safe approach is unsafe. The emperor has no clothes.” If you’re going along to get
along, and that feels safe, be aware that that may be safe in the short run, but it
may be very
unsafe in the long run.
Let’s talk about Balisage for another minute. There are conferences where all of the
presentations are comfortable, safe, and non-controversial; where everybody loves
everyone else;
where bluebirds flit decoratively through the hallways without soiling anybody; and
where
anybody who sounds a sour note and talks about anything that doesn’t work or can’t
be done is not invited back (quietly behind the scenes so as not to upset the paying
customers).
You’re not at one of those conferences.
There are conferences where every talk is expected to give the audience members something
they can use next week. They want a “take-away” from every forty-five minute
presentation of something practical that is implementable immediately. You are not
at one of
those conferences, either.
This is a place where you should expect to have your ideas challenged and to hear
about some
work that you don’t understand or that you don’t understand the logic behind or
the reasons for. Expect to hear about projects unlike yours and organizations with
priorities
different from yours. Expect to hear some stuff you don’t quite understand. (I know
I
will. I read all the papers; I know there’s going to be stuff here I don’t
understand. With luck, I will get some of it.) Expect that in the next year or two
or three,
some of the things that you heard here will come to mind as you are thinking about
a
problem or decision. It’s possible some of them will actually
be practically useful; it is more likely that they will get you thinking about things
that will
help you in the future, get you out of places where you’re stuck. Expect the payback
on
Balisage to be real, substantial, difficult to document, and significantly delayed.
As you speak at Balisage, stick your neck out a bit. Tell us about the good stuff:
what have
you done well? Tell us about the unfinished stuff: what do you want to do next? Tell
us about
the things that unexpectedly don’t work. Tell us about what you want to do in the
future,
about what you’re thinking.
We have some first-time speakers. One of the things I really enjoyed this year when
the
submissions came in is we got submissions from a whole lot of people I’d never heard
of.
That’s really good! Please don't misunderstand me, I am very happy to see old friends
and familiar faces here, but I am particularly pleased to see all of these new people.
So, I say particularly to the new speakers, be warned: discussion here will be courteous
but lively. People will question your assumptions. They will question your methods.
They may
agree with you for some very odd reasons. That’s the most disconcerting — when somebody
gets up to the microphone and says, “Yes, you are absolutely right because the moon
is
made of old socks!” (Talk to them in the hallway afterwards.)
Expect lively discussion. Be aware that, at least in my opinion, the best contributions
to
Balisage will end up on our evaluation forms on both the “best of” lists and the
“worst of” lists. When you look at the evaluation form, it asks you to list the
talks you liked the best and the talks you liked the least. There are some talks that
will end
up only on the “best” list, and that’s nice; somebody gave a good talk. I
like that. And there are some talks that will end up only on the “worst” list, and
well, that happens, and it’s unfortunate. I don’t which it will be, but I expect that
we’ll have at least one total dog of a talk this week. But the really good ones will
end
up in both places because they will polarize people, and that’s what makes people
think.
That’s what we’re here for. So, welcome to Balisage; let’s start thinking.