Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1, Nature
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
- John Muir
I'm standing on an island beach in the northwest corner of Lake Superior. After nine hours in
my Honda Civic and six hours aboard the Ranger III, my backpack and I have been transported
into the wilderness archipelago of Isle Royale National Park. While this rugged, isolated refuge
is among the least visited of our national parks, it's well-known among ecologists for its wolf
and moose, subjects of the longest continuous study of a predator-prey relationship in the
world.
Of course, I'm not here as a scientist. I'm here to hike. But I was drawn to this place by the story
of its ecosystem. When the study began in 1958, well-established mathematical models of preda-
tion described how the populations should rise and fall as part of a cyclical, co-evolutionary pat-
tern that maintains the “balance of nature.” For the first few years, things proceeded as expec-
ted. But the ecologist, Durward Allen, had the foresight to persevere beyond the normal period
of observation, and the dramatic, dynamic variation that unfolded was an illuminating surprise.
The more we studied, the more we came to realize how poor our previous explanations had been. The ac-
curacy of our predictions for Isle Royale wolf and moose populations is comparable to those for long-
term weather and financial markets. Every five-year period in the Isle Royale history has been different
from every other five-year period - even after fifty years of close observation.
i
This is a lesson in humility, and a sign of what's to come for those who labor in today's high-
tech ecologies. In user experience and digital strategy, there's a lot of talk about “ecosystems”
that integrate devices and touchpoints across channels. While this is a step in the right direction,
our models and prescriptions belie the true complexity of our information systems and the or-
ganizations they are designed to serve.
Recently, while I was consulting with a Fortune 500 that does over $2 billion a year in online
sales, one of my clients explained that over the years he'd seen lots of consultants fail to create
lasting change. “They tell us to improve consistency, so we clean up our website, but the clutter
soon comes back. We keep making the same mistakes, over and over.”
This infinite loop to nowhere results from treating symptoms without knowing the cause, a bad
habit with which we're all too familiar. Part of our problem is human nature. We're impatient.
We choose immediate gratification and the illusion of efficiency over the longer, harder but
more effective course of action. And part of our problem is culture. Our institutions and mind-
sets remain stuck in the industrial age. Businesses are designed as machines, staffed by special-
ists in silos. Each person does their part, but nobody understands the whole.
