Over the last several months, as I’ve been serializing this novel about surveillance in the modern workplace that many of you have been reading, I’ve had a realization:

I don’t like reading serialized fiction.

It’s hard for me to stay engaged; I forget what happened in the previous chapters; it doesn’t allow me to keep going if I want to read on.

In the end, I decided that reading fiction like this just wasn’t working for me. And if it’s not working for me, why should I expect it to work for you?

So I’m making a change.

I’m putting the remaining chapters of my story up on my Substack Fiction home page and I’m linking them below. If you like a chapter and want to keep going, you can follow the <Next Chapter> links included at the beginning and end of each chapter, or you can return to this table of contents if that’s easier.

Basically, you get to read as fast or as slow as you want. I’m hoping that some of you will get caught up enough in the narrative to rush to the end—I know that at some point, that’s what happened to me.

Please note: If you’re a person who only reads their Substack subscriptions in your email, you’ll either have to change your ways and go to the website or the Substack app or just stop reading. I hope not the latter! Please let me know though and if there are enough of you, I’ll figure something out.

Chapter 17: Stamper Takes an Override

Chapter 18: Cascade Reviews the Data

Chapter 19: Friction

Chapter 20: Verbal Override Requested

Chapter 21: Bury These Friction Reports!

Chapter 22: Swale Canyon Showdown

Chapter 23: Shut This Down!

Chapter 24: Party at Dan’s House

Chapter 25: Two-Way Door

Your thoughts and observations are always welcome, either in the comments section or via email.

< Previous Chapter | First Chapter | Plot Summary >

Stamper knew what she should do. She should sit down with Cascade and lay out her plan, get his input and his buy-in, and then launch it to her whole team at the HD all-hands that they had scheduled next week.

But she’d had it with Mitch Cascade. She knew how he’d react, knew exactly how he’d try to bully and cajole her into doing it his way, and frankly, she knew that there was nothing he could say to dissuade her from her plan. She couldn’t do it his way, and he wouldn’t support her way. So it was time for her to make an executive decision.

Was it this kind of thinking that led Keith Conn to release his Friction Reports to the whole team, instead of keeping them to “executive eyes” only? At the time, Stamper had thought Keith was just clumsy or—preposterously, she now realized—maybe even malicious, seeking to undermine her somehow. But she now knew that Keith had seen the storm clouds approaching long before she had—with his ear to distant rumblings of the data, he had foretold the slowly emerging resistance to the HD system long before their confrontation with Christopher. And he must have known that the only way to get her attention was to release the reports to the whole team, forcing it to the forefront of her attention.

But who hadn’t seen it before her? Christopher, sure, but even Dan—who only saw it from the outside—had warned her of what would happen if they went too far. And she had to admit, they’d gone too far.

Now it was time to step back.

This was, she thought to herself, the classic “two-way door” that was as crucial to the Amazonian way of thinking as any of the Leadership Principles. There was nothing that they had done in instituting the HD system that they couldn’t undo—no behavior they were tracking that they couldn’t simply stop tracking. But they had to want to do it. And she knew that Mitch Cascade wouldn’t support a step back.

That’s why she decided that she wouldn’t share her plan with him in advance, but would instead launch it full-blown in front of his very eyes, in the team meeting, so that he was virtually forced to accept her conclusions—their conclusions, really, hers and Keith’s and Christopher’s—or break with her and the team so conclusively that he would be left standing alone. She didn’t think he wanted that ... and she was ready to gamble that she was right.

Taking on the HD system on his own would require that he own the vision for how the system worked, the underlying behavioral modification mechanisms that she had developed over years. She didn’t think that was his game. Sure, he liked the ideas behind it—the push to eliminate wasted time and ensure conformity, to build “perfect Amazonians”—but he didn’t have what it took to manage a team to run that system. He could throw around orders and tell people what to do, but he couldn’t actually provide the insight and the deep understanding to guide its operation. Only Stamper could do that, and now she had to have the courage to test this idea.

So, in the hours between when she left Dan’s house and when she got to work the next day, she plotted to divert Cascade from understanding her plan, even while she prepared to launch what might well be a coup. Because she couldn’t see this move as anything but a one-way door: once Cascade became aware of her plan to back off the deep monitoring, he’d either have to get rid of her and take control himself, or he’d have to back off. She couldn’t imagine a compromise.

These were the thoughts banging around her brain when she arrived at work that Friday morning. She knew deep in her bones that Cascade would be waiting for her in her office when she arrived, and she was not disappointed.

“So, what’s the plan Stamper?” Cascade asked as she walked into her office. “I brought you a coffee so we could start talking right away,” he smiled, handing her a cup.

“Mitch, what a pleasant surprise!,” she replied, “but didn’t I tell you, I quit drinking coffee?”

“You ... did ... what ...?” He looked honestly confused. 

“Just kidding,” she laughed, “thanks for the coffee.” 

“Whew, I thought you’d lost your mind!” he laughed with her, and he looked about to start in when she jumped in:

“Mitch, I’ve got a plan I want to share with you,” she started. “I talked to Keith—yes, sternly, don’t look at me like that—and convinced him that there’s a way for him to retract some of his conclusions without coming right out and admitting he was lying.”

“So you’re keeping him,” Mitch accused.

“Yes, I’m keeping him,” said Stamper, “and he’s going to be even better in the future because he’s clearer now on what I need from him.”

“So you really laid into him?” said Cascade, relishing the idea.

“In my way, I suppose I did. My goal, Mitch, is to make sure he understands my vision for how we run the HD system. Believe me, he understands it better now,” she replied, knowing that she was telling the truth, even if she also knew Mitch would take it differently.

“So we’re going to use the HD all-hands on Tuesday to talk about how easy it is to misunderstand data, and Keith and I reran the data to come up some different readings that we’d like to share with the team. I’ll let him lead some of it so he doesn’t lose face. We’ll use that to ask everybody to recommit to our shared mission.”

“Do you want me to open the meeting with some blood and thunder, Stamper?” asked Cascade. “Just a little reminder that the big boss is watching and we’re not going to tolerate dissent?” She half expected him to rub his hands in anticipation. 

“Actually Mitch, I’d like you to close the meeting, just say a few short words to remind everyone how important this is to the S-team, to the company. I want it to be your words that are ringing in their ears at the end,” she replied.

“Oooh, that’s even better Stamper, I like it,” he beamed, “and Stamper, thank you. You heard me, that’s good. I still think you could be a bit more forceful, but I’m getting that’s not your style.”

“Oh yeah, I’ve heard you loud and clear Mitch,” she replied, looking him directly in the eye.

“We make a good team Stamper!” he said, standing up and heading for the door. “Make sure you tell them it’s Day One at the meeting, right?” And then he was gone.

The office buzzed on the morning of the all-hands, buzzed with the anticipation that something was brewing, and it was felt by even those who had no idea what Kate Stamper was planning. It had barely been a week since Keith Conn, the affable but soft-spoken data analyst, dropped those Friction Reports on the whole team, and those reports had been the subject of frequent discussions—the kind of discussions that hushed the moment that Stamper or her boss, Mitch Cascade, approached, because they felt vaguely traitorous. Jokes began to circulate that Keith Conn must have only been confused about the LP “Have backbone, disagree and commit.” He sure had backbone, but this wasn’t what disagree and commit usually looked like. Usually it looked like “do what your manager says.”

In the brief agenda announcement for the meeting, Keith Conn was listed as one of the speakers for the all-hands, along with someone they had never heard of: Christopher Dourado. Would this be a meeting where it was announced that Keith was “transferring to seek another opportunity,” and this Dourado guy was announced as his replacement? Rumor had it that this was the way people who resisted Mitch Cascade usually moved on, if they weren’t just fired outright. But usually they didn’t attend the meeting to announce their departure. Usually it was just some bullshit “thank you” post on Slack and you never saw the guy again. Or would we get the rare “mea culpa,” with Keith forced to recant his reading of the data? 

The HD team wasn’t usually a gossipy group—they genuinely liked each other and liked what they were doing—but this last week had been too interesting not to prompt a lot of speculation, and it helped draw a big team into the office. Even folks who generally took these all-hands meetings from home came in. This was too big to be missed.

And so there was an energy in the room as people began to file into the big downstairs auditorium. Cascade had insisted that he walk in with Stamper—“It will send the right signal,” he said—and Stamper had replied with, “That’s cool with me, as long as we get there ten minutes early so I can circulate and talk with people.” He tried to convince her otherwise—“They need to think you’re too important to show up early”—but she said, “Sorry Mitch, this is my signature move” and headed out the door with him trailing behind.

She peeled away from him the moment they entered, working the room in her trademark style, greeting people by name, asking about their work with precision and interest, spreading a positive vibe in a way that few could match. Cascade wasn’t used to arriving at meetings early and scarcely knew what to do with himself. He didn’t want to sit at the table up front—honestly, he didn’t see his name plate up there anyway—so he leaned against the wall toward the side, grinning at people as they started to slowly trickle in. He greeted the men with an upward cock of his head, and the women with a smile and a mouthed “hi.” As the flow increased, he’d add “Good to see you” and “Gonna be a good meeting,” but you could tell he was uncomfortable without a clear role to play.

Cascade saw Keith Conn walk in just a few minutes before the meeting was to start, trailed by a guy with a long beard and long hair who he didn’t know. Cascade half expected Keith to avoid him; after all, he had to know that Cascade was behind Stamper’s crackdown on him and his stupid reports. But Keith walked right up and said hello:

“Mr. Cascade, I’m Keith Conn. We’ve met before, but I don’t know that you remember me.” 

“I know who you are Keith,” said Cascade seriously, though he kept a smile on for those around him. “I bet you’re glad to still be here.”

“Still be here? Uh, sure,” replied Keith, not sure where that had come from. Did Cascade fully understand what was planned for this meeting? Keith didn’t know—but he knew how to keep small talk going. “This should be a good meeting,” he offered.

“I’m looking forward to us focusing our attention on what matters,” replied Cascade. “Who’s your friend?” He turned to Christopher and extended his hand, “Hi, I’m Mitch Cascade.” Christopher got the full dazzle, the high-beam treatment, complete with firm handshake.

“The famous Mitch Cascade,” said Christopher, “I’ve heard ALL about you. I’m Christopher Dourado.”

“Heard all about me ... good things, I hope?” said Cascade, incapable of imagining otherwise. “You’re the person who I don’t know on the agenda. Stamper didn’t tell me what your role was ...” 

Christopher would have explained—he didn’t give a shit about Mitch Cascade—but right at that moment, Stamper trilled this two-finger whistle she was famous for and called the meeting to order.

“I’m so happy to see everybody!” Stamper began. “Gina, welcome back, I hope your new baby is doing great. Vamshi, aren’t you just back from three weeks in India? Good job making it to this meeting. In fact, good job all of you! I haven’t seen this many people in the office in ... well, shit, ever!” 

“Somebody—I won’t say who—told me that the big in-person turnout was because they expected fireworks from this meeting. Does anyone want to tell me what that’s about?” Stamper looked about with mock seriousness. There was a rustle of nervous laughter; god forbid anyone be called upon to identify the elephant in the room. 

“Don’t worry!” she continued, “I’m not going to call on anybody.” And this time the laughter was more relaxed.

“I’m not going to call on anybody because I know why there’s excitement for today’s meeting. It’s because of the Friction Reports produced by our lead data analyst, Keith Conn. For those of you who don’t know him, Keith is here to my left.” Keith ducked his head and held up his hand in acknowledgment.

“Now, some of you may think I should be pissed at Keith for these reports ...”

Cascade, who was sitting in the front row, nodded his head vigorously in agreement, looked around for confirmation, and waited for her to give him the public dressing down he so richly deserved. 

“ ... but in truth,” Stamper continue, “I want to thank him for his courage in compiling and releasing these reports. It’s not often that someone has the courage to tell their boss that they disagree with her, and steps up to present the data that explains why they disagree.”

Cascade was not the only one to wonder where this was going. It almost sounded like Stamper was praising Keith for these reports. Cascade and many of those around him waited for the other shoe to drop.

“Now some of you will say, Keith was supposed to disagree and commit—he was supposed to go along with the progression of our taps and interventions, because we had all agreed on advancing from the simple taps to the more complicated behavioral taps and predictive taps. Moreover, we all knew that the S-team liked where we were going. What a great chance for Keith to embrace the LP, ‘Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit.’”

Cascade nodded his head, and there was a murmur of agreement elsewhere in the room: many people believed that Keith had violated this principle and should be punished for that. Not Stamper.

“But guys, remember, picking out one leadership principle and using that to try to bully others into submission is not what we’re about. So let’s look at how Keith lived up to several of the other LPs. One, he ‘dove deep’: when Keith saw data that pointed away from our existing hypotheses, he didn’t look away or hide from what he saw, he dug in deeper, collecting additional data and looking for correlations between the different data streams.”

Cascade didn’t like where this was going. He sat back, crossing his arms across his chest. 

“What he saw convinced him that the data we had been gathering did not reflect the full spectrum of possible reactions to our program. He was intensely curious about what else was there—I don’t need to quote this LP for you—and he was also insistent on us meeting the highest standards for data collection (there’s another LP), which meant broadening the focus of our Daily Pulse questions and not “leading the witness” by forcing data to only tell us what we wanted.”

“So Keith pushed on, gathered more data, and then decided that it wasn’t just him or the leadership team that needed to take ownership of the data, it was all of us, every one of you working on this HD team.”

By this point, most of the team was leaning forward, eagerly seeing where this would go next. The only one leaning back in their seat was Mitch Cascade.

“So at this point, I want to publicly thank Keith for having the courage to let the data lead him where it may, and for sharing this data with all of you. Keith has offered us this wonderful opportunity to—as a team—look into the heart of our data collection practices and consider how we want to conduct our program as we move ahead. Keith, thank you!” she said, and she reached her hand out to get him to stand up beside her and bask, in his sheepish way, in the applause from the vast majority of the crowd.

“Now,” said Stamper as Keith sat down and the applause died, “I want to introduce you to someone else who was involved in these Friction Reports, Christopher Dourado.” She gestured to her right, and Christopher waved his hand and smiled.

“Any of you who have read the reports—and I’m guessing that’s all of you—will recognize that there was an early source of what Keith has called ‘friction’ emanating from a certain product management team, and that this friction seemed to emanate outward from this team, spreading across the broader team and into other areas of the organization like a bad disease. Well, my friend Christopher here was patient zero in this disease: he was the first person to show a committed resistance to our taps, and in fact, he did more than that, he actively challenged good old Huddy and then Keith and then me to come face-to-face with some of the, uh, unintended consequences of our behavioral taps.”

“Unintended consequences?” laughed Christopher. “That wasn’t my term! I called them a ‘pain in my ass!’”

Stamper laughed along with him. “That and many other colorful terms!”

“When I first learned about Christopher’s resistance, I wanted to fire him, plain and simple,” said Stamper. “But then Keith showed me something I couldn’t ignore: Christopher was one of the top performers on our product team. His resistance to our behavioral taps didn’t impact his performance at all! In fact, what we saw was that resistance like his was most common among high performers. I hope some of you also saw this in the Friction Reports. It was this ‘correlation,’ as Keith would call it, that kept me from going after Christopher and made me stop and wonder what else we were missing by not developing a deeper understanding of the, well, Human Dynamics of the behavioral monitoring and modification we were attempting.”

“So, I want to thank Christopher Dourado for being such a pain in the ass, and for describing so colorfully and, alright, elegantly, how our behavioral taps were preventing him from doing his best work.”

Christopher, always willing to ham it up, stood up and took a deep bow, the only sign that he had any humility at all the deep blush that spread across his face.

“Okay, so I want to apologize to anyone who lost money by putting their bets on ‘Stamper is going to fire Keith on the spot,’” she said and, looking Cascade directly in the eyes, continued, “but I want you to know, I do not take vengeance on those who disagree with me. Especially when they are able to show me, carefully and thoughtfully and with a ton of data, that my vaunted system—our vaunted system—may not be performing exactly as intended.” 

“I want to announce that today is the first day of our work on HD 2.0, a revision and improvement on our system that is designed to limit time spent on meaningless activities and make it easier for you to work, but at the same time allow everyone to have the latitude and the creativity to innovate, to ‘think big,’ show a ‘bias for action,’ and ‘invent and simplify’ in order to show our ‘customer obsession.’ We can not do any of these things ... correction, you can not do any of these things—unless you are allowed to be unique individuals and not, to quote my friend Christopher, ‘cookie cutter Amazonian robots.’”

“Keith Conn is going to be head of data collection for this new effort, and he’s going to need your help, so I want you to seek him out if you have a way of looking at our data differently.”

“And Christopher Dourado is going to lead a committee of people from across the company to review and improve our work. I told him I wanted to call him ‘Lead Contrarian,’ but he reminded me that if they’re allowed to do their work correctly, they soon won’t be contrarians but our biggest cheerleaders. If you know of people outside our organization who would be willing to help out here, please be in touch with Christopher directly. He’s on loan to our organization until we’re ready to release.”

“As for me, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing—but I’ll do it better, because these people had the courage to help me see the unintended consequences of our actions. I’ll keep trying to build the best and most human people management system I can build, and it will be guided by the principles that I’ve seen my two colleagues display. They may not be explicitly stated in the leadership principles, but these guys showed a moral courage and conviction that I think we can all use as an example. They showed me that even as we strive for productivity and efficiency, and try to use cool technology to do it, we must always, always strive to retain our humanity, our uniqueness, and our splendid weirdness.”

Cascade had sunk into himself as her speech went on. Both his arms and his legs were crossed, his brow was furrowed, and he seemed to be gnawing on his lower lip. So he had to recover quickly when Stamper said, “And now, I’d like to leave the last word to someone who needs no introduction, Mitch Cascade.”

Cascade stood, and he walked to the side of the room, to stand behind the podium that no one had used. “Well,” he stammered, “that was quite a speech, quite a speech.” He grinned, a weak imitation of his usual high-power gleam. And he pointed over to Kate Stamper: “This is quite the leader you’ve got here.” Only Kate got that it could have been interpreted as a dig. 

And then he seemed to struggle for words: “I just want to say, um, that ... well, some of this wasn’t quite what I expected. But, uh, Stamper brought up a lot of good Leadership Principles stuff, they’re always good, always good. So you know, keep up the good work, and remember, it’s always Day One. It’s always Day One! Good job everybody. Gotta run to my next meeting.” And with that, Cascade turned and walked straight out the door. He did not look back.

Cascade’s stumbling closing words and abrupt departure did nothing to dissipate the energy in the room, the energy of 60 people turning to each other with a renewed commitment to the work they all shared. People gathered around Christopher and Keith and Stamper, speaking rapidly about the new things they wanted to try, problems they had seen but had not surfaced.

But other work called, and slowly the room emptied, leaving just the three at the front of the room. They looked at each other, acknowledging the crash of energy that was overtaking them all, the recovery from the adrenaline of the meeting. 

Keith was the first to speak: “Well, what now?” he asked. 

“You know what our buddy Dan would say,” Christopher replied.

“Oh god, what?” asked Stamper. 

Christopher did his best Dan imitation: “After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake!” groaned Stamper.

And they all laughed.

<THE END>

< Previous Chapter | First Chapter | Plot Summary | Next Chapter >

Stamper picked up the phone as soon as she knew that Cascade was out of earshot. She hesitated for just a moment, wondering if her call would be recorded, but then she thought “screw this” and dialed anyway. 

“Dan,” said Stamper as soon as he picked up. “Can you do me a favor?”

“Hi to you Stamper! It’s been a while,” he laughed.

“Oh yeah, hi, sorry,” she said. “Got a lot on my mind. Anyway, can you do me a favor?”

“Sure Stamper, no problem, as long as I don’t have to kill anyone.”

“Ha ha, no killing. I just want you to host a little get together. You, me, Keith, and Christopher.” 

“Oh wow, yeah, that sounds great. I’ve tried to get Keith and Christopher together before, but Keith was too busy. But I bet he’ll do it if you ask him.”

“He will. So will Christopher. But I need this to happen soon.”

“How soon?” asked Dan.

“Tonight,” replied Stamper.

“Seriously?” he asked.

“Yes, 7:00. Get pizza and beer. I’ll pay you back.”

“Stamper, you’re a trip! I’ve got to check with Erin, let me call you back in a few.”

“Dan, I need it to be yes. Please. I’ll make it up to Erin, I promise.” 

Dan couldn’t recall a time he had heard Stamper so serious.

“Okay Kate, I’ll make it work. Is everything okay? You sound ... off.”

“It’s fine. Thank you. See you tonight,” and she hung up.

Well, thought Dan, this should be interesting.

Erin wasn’t pissed at all. She liked Stamper and Christopher, and—though she could never quite figure out how these two had come from the same gene pool—she liked Dan’s brother Keith. And truthfully, she was curious as hell about what could possibly bring Kate Stamper to call an emergency meeting at their house, of all things. She and Dan immediately started speculating about what was going on to spur this impromptu summit.

“I get Keith and Stamper,” said Erin. “After all, they work closely together. But why Christopher? I thought you said he was paranoid about this HD program Stamper is running?”

“He is, or he was the last time we talked. He’s the one who got me worried that Stamper’s ideas were getting a little out of control. I wonder if Stamper needs a back-channel place to tell Christopher to ... I don’t know. Quit? Ship up? It’s fucking weird.”

“Didn’t Stamper and Christopher have a thing once?” asked Erin. 

“Sort of,” replied Dan. “Stamper was into him one day, and then suddenly she wasn’t. Stamper was like that with everybody.” 

“Including you,” Erin chided.

“And you know how far that got!,” Dan replied. “I’m a one-woman man!”

“Yeah, yeah,” she smiled. “So if it’s Stamper and Christopher working out a personal thing, why is Keith invited?”

“Maybe Stamper needs a witness?” wondered Dan. He honestly couldn’t figure it out. “I’ll tell you what though,” he laughed. “I’d put money on Keith arriving first ...”

“And Christopher last!,” laughed Erin.

They were both right. Keith got there first, fully ten minutes early. Keith was early to everything, after all. Keith was usually so careful to talk to Erin and ask about the kids, but this time, he quickly pulled Dan aside and asked, “Do you know what this is about?”

“I know nothing! Erin and I have been speculating ...” said Dan—but they were interrupted by the sound of the doorbell, then Erin opening the door. 

“Erin, hi,” gushed Stamper, giving her a big hug. 

“Hi Kate, it’s been a while,” said Erin warmly. Erin knew that Stamper had crushed on Dan for a bit, but she didn’t hold it against her and she knew nothing had ever happened. To Erin, Stamper was simply a force of nature, someone to be wondered at. Erin was one of the few people to call her Kate. “I’m sorry we haven’t asked you over ...”

“So I fixed that by asking myself over!” laughed Stamper. “I see you beat me here, Keith.”

“Big surprise, huh?” Keith smiled warmly. “You didn’t think that a leopard would change its spots just because his boss issued a surprise command to show up at his brother’s house did you?”

Dan and Erin exchanged an amused glance. Was deferential Keith actually giving his boss a hard time?

“No, I should have known that I had to show up 30 minutes in advance to get out in front of you!,” laughed Stamper.

Keith and Stamper had clearly established a nice rapport, thought Dan. It was nice seeing his little brother show a little confidence. They all went into the kitchen together, Erin urging them to help themselves to a beer from the fridge.

For ten minutes they chatted easily, but Stamper couldn’t help stealing a glance at her watch. It was 7:15 and there was no sign of Christopher. She hadn’t been able to get him on the phone or on Chime, but he did answer her Slack message asking if he could show up at Dan’s at 7:00 pm. It would be just like him to throw a monkey wrench in her plans.

She recalled their exchange: 

“Do you have the address?” she wrote.

“👍,” he replied

“See you there at 7?” she double-checked. 

“👍,” he shot back.

“Thx,” she returned, echoing his brevity..

“🤷🏼‍♂️”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“I’ll be there,” he replied, and then his green light disappeared. He had closed the program. She wondered if maybe he would just not show up. That would take some nerve, but she wouldn’t put it past him. 

So she was relieved when, at 7:20, the doorbell rang and he didn’t wait, just opened the door and called out, “I’m here, late as usual.” 

Dan greeted him first, wrapping his buddy in a hug. “I wouldn’t expect you any other time!”

Stamper and Christopher stood back, unsure quite how to read him, but Christopher quickly diffused any tension by saying, “Hi guys, I’m sorry, really—I just always forget how long it takes to get out here,” and he was so warm and genuine that Stamper quickly forgot about their cryptic exchange. In an odd way, it just felt like a gathering of old friends, and for 15 or 20 minutes—long enough for Dan to crack his second beer—that’s what it was. But Stamper broke it up when she said, “I’ll have a second beer after we cover some serious business.”

“Serious business?” said Dan. “You didn’t tell me this was a business meeting!” 

“I know, but it is—and you’re our arbitrator,” said Stamper. Only Dan was surprised. Keith and Christopher both acted like they had expected something like this.

Dan looked hard at her: she was dead serious. Erin had seen it right away, and she slipped out with a “I’m going to leave you guys to it.” She hated work talk, and her studio always beckoned to her anyway.

“I wouldn’t normally think we’d need an arbitrator, until Christopher and I got together last weekend and found ourselves totally deadlocked ...”

“Wait,” interrupted Keith, “you were with Christopher last weekend? The rumor was you had a death in the family!”

“I kept it pretty quiet. I think we both did. But yeah, after that call you and I had with Christopher, we finally got together for a long conversation...,” said Stamper.

“You call that a conversation? It sure felt like an argument to me!,” said Christopher. 

“Down in this godforsaken canyon in Eastern Washington,” continued Stamper. 

“What the hell?,” said Dan, at the exact same time Keith asked, “Why a canyon?”

“Because I wanted to make sure that Stamper’s freaking HD spies weren’t following us ...” said Christopher.

“There are no HD spies Christopher!” Stamper slammed her hand on the kitchen counter. “You’re just being paranoid.  I notice you agreed to come here,” she said, an I-told-you-so tone in her voice. 

“I thought this was just a friendly get-together, for fuck’s sake!,” said Christopher. “I didn’t realize I was coming to a Human Dynamics summit. Where’s your grinning psychopathic puppet master anyway? I thought you two were joined at the hip.”

“Goddammit Christopher ...” started Stamper. They were both getting hot.

But Dan interrupted: “Guys, guys, I see why Stamper wanted a neutral party on hand. Can we both take it down a notch?”

“Christopher, I’m sorry,” said Stamper earnestly. “I’m not your enemy.”

“I know Kate,” replied Christopher. “I’m not yours either. Friends?” He extended his hand and they shook.

“Okay,” said Keith, “I’m starting to see what’s going on. Can I set the stage for Dan?” 

And with that, the ever-reasonable, pragmatic Keith weaved together the strands that Dan had picked up over the months from all of them, bringing them into a coherent story that Keith, Stamper, and Christopher could all agree on. 

In its barest bones, it looked like this: Stamper had come to Amazon with a dream for how to revolutionize compliance training, and soon realized that Amazon’s data collection and content delivery capacities offered her everything she had been hoping for ... and a hell of a lot more. Mitch Cascade, who had found great success in mining customer data to increase sales and had also been involved in increasing productivity among warehouse workers and drivers, had joined Human Dynamics with the idea that they could use Stamper’s “system” to maximize productivity and “alignment” among Amazon’s growing knowledge-worker population. He drove Stamper and her growing team to optimize performance and “utilization” with a system that closely observed a vast array of employee behaviors and offered “taps” and “interventions” to steer employees in the right direction. Some of these took the place of training, but others were designed to teach people to think like Amazonians. Keith had joined the team during this period of growth and proved critical to helping Stamper visualize and communicate the system’s successes to leadership. The system worked beautifully ... perhaps “too beautifully,” admitted Keith ... and the majority of employees demonstrated “positive” growth in the core metrics. There was just one problem: some employees chafed at the interventions.

“That’s me, Exhibit A for chafing employees,” inserted Christopher.

“Exhibit A for pain in the ass,” joked Stamper. 

“Yeah, yeah,” said Keith, “we’ll get to that. But let me just be dispassionate about it. What we saw was increasing evidence of people pushing back against the taps. At first it was just really quiet, and people were low-key about it, because it was just so clear that the S-team loved the HD system, but over time it grew, in ways that I was having a hard time pinning down in data.”

Dan laughed. This was the brother he loved: relentlessly logical and committed to putting the world in order.

“So I looked for correlations in the broader data set, and what I noticed was that ‘resistance,’ or ‘friction’ as I came to call it, had this strange correlation with heightened productivity.” 

“Huh?” said Dan. “Remember Keith, I’m not an Amazonian like you guys.” 

“Right. How’s this: the people who resisted the taps appeared to be our best employees. People like Christopher.”

“The fuck?” laughed Christopher. “That’s the first I’ve heard that one.” 

“It’s true though,” said Keith. “When I first noticed the anomalies I later came to associate with you, I thought you were just screwing with us.”

“And I was! Your damned taps are so annoying,” laughed Christopher.

“What I thought I’d find was that your Pulse file would indicate other problems ... but exactly the opposite was true. Your performance ratings are impeccable.” 

“Damned right!” said Christopher. He was enjoying this more than he expected.

“Weirder yet, you (and a couple other people like you in other divisions) appeared to be ... infectious or something.”

“This is where I started to get interested,” insert Stamper. “Because it seemed so odd: it was the best employees who were most tap-resistant, and they seemed to spread that tap-resistance to others who were working around them. I mean, when I first told Cascade about this, he said, ‘Well, just fire them if they’re spreading negativity,’ but Keith could clearly show that not only was tap resistance increasing, so was performance. These people, people like Christopher, seemed to increase tap resistance in those they worked with—but they seemed to increase performance even more.” 

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you Stamper!,” blurted Christopher. “If you put people in a cage, they can’t thrive. But if they think they’re free to create and innovate—and if they feel like they can stick it to the man a little bit—they fucking do great things.” 

“Oh shut up,” said Stamper, “nobody is putting anybody in a cage. We’re helping you! Don’t you see how much better it is when we help people avoid mistakes, especially repeat mistakes, and learn to be better Amazonians?”

“This is where we got stuck last time!” exclaimed Christopher, refusing to take the bait. 

“Let me just tie this up,” said Keith. “Stamper’s right: high performance correlated with high friction, and we could see both increasing in pockets throughout the organization. It became a ... well, a conundrum that Stamper and I had to figure out. And that’s why we started to interact with Christopher more.”

“I knew it!,” exalted Christopher. “It just started to feel like I was getting tapped by people, not the system.” 

“Well, the system tapped you, but we jumped in on the interactions,” said Keith.

“And that’s when we could see that maybe we needed to learn more about where you were coming from,” said Stamper. 

“Is that when you released those ‘Friction Reports’ Keith,” asked Christopher. “That was badass!”

“Woah, woah, what are ‘Friction Reports,’” asked Dan. “No disrespect to my brother, but I’ve never heard one of his reports labeled ‘badass’ before.”

“Screw you Dan,” said Keith with a smile. 

“Yeah, mild-mannered Keith really took us all by surprise with these ‘Friction Reports,’” said Stamper ruefully. “They pulled together all this data that illustrated the ‘friction’ that our taps were creating in some people, and, uh, helpfully drew attention to the fact that the fiction was highest among top performers. Honestly, I could have used a little more time to work this stuff before it went public,” she admonished Keith without malice. 

“I felt like I had to do it, Stamper. I could just sense the pressure that you were under, and I thought if I didn’t bring this stuff out into the daylight a bit, Cascade was going to seize control, fire some people, and we’d never have a chance. Christopher, I think you came this close to losing your job,” said Keith, his fingers nearly touching for emphasis. 

“I felt that!” said Christopher. “And honest to god, I did not give a shit. I don’t give a shit now. Look, I love parts of working here: I love being able to bring software to market at the scale we’ve got, I love how good the engineers are, I love having access to these kinds of resources. But I’m not going to be some fucking robot. I’m not going to let your damned system objectify me into nothingness. Fuck that!”

“You know Christopher, you would have been fired if it wasn’t for Kate, so why don’t you give her a fucking break?,” barked Keith. “She protected you because she was sure you had something useful to tell us.”

“The only problem is, all we get is this ‘robot’ and ‘objectify me into nothingness’ horseshit! You know that’s not who I am!,” complained Stamper, her voice tight with anger and hurt. “I’m not the control freak you’re making me out to be!”

Wow, thought Dan, he could see why Stamper wanted him in this conversation. All three of them were so deeply invested in this that they couldn’t hear each other. But it was Kate who was about to blow, and he placed his hand on Stamper’s forearm, and said, “Kate, can I take this one?”

Stamper let out a long, loud breath, and said, “Fine, that’s why I wanted you here. But I’m not letting that robot shit go.” She smiled at Christopher, though it looked more like a grimace.

“Okay, can I just tell you guys what I’m seeing?” said Dan. They all nod, eager to stand down from the ramparts they had climbed.

“This is what it looks like to me: Stamper isn’t ready to give up on her system, but she’s open to the idea that it needs to be modified. Keith really loves digging around in this much data, and he’s willing to let the truth in the data come out—in fact, he’s committed enough to that to really stick his neck out. And Christopher just wants people off his back!” 

“Wait a minute,” said Christopher, “I do want that ... but that’s not the whole story!”

“Well what am I missing, because all I’ve heard you say so far is that this system—you guys call it the HD system, right?—is too in your business.”

“Yeah, fair enough! But when I first got here, I thought it was cool as hell. I think there’s a lot to it—I think it’s just gone too far.”

“I’m not even sure that saying it’s ‘gone too far’ does it justice,” inserted Keith.

“Keith, really? You’re jumping on Christopher’s bandwagon?” asked Stamper.

“I’m not on anyone’s bandwagon!” said Keith. “But I want to bring something up that we’re not even talking about.” 

“What the?” asked Dan, incredulously. And then “Keith?” as if he wasn’t even sure it was his brother bringing up this point.

“Look, one area where Christopher is right is that we in Human Dynamics are sitting on a system of employee monitoring the likes of which the world has never seen before. Now Christopher likes to piss and moan about how it cramps his style, but I want to know, do you guys have any idea what delivery drivers and warehouse workers are dealing with?”

“Keith, that’s a whole different story, a whole different system,” said Stamper. “We don’t have anything to do with that?”

“Bullshit!,” said Keith, and everyone else in the room raised their eyebrows in surprise. “Are we part of Amazon or are we not?”

“Yes, of course,” said Stamper, “but these systems aren’t connected at all ...”

“But they are: they’re part of a corporate program to restrict the autonomy of workers across the entire company. The only reason we’re all here is because this is the first time that knowledge workers have really been subject to this level of monitoring and behavioral control. But workers elsewhere in Amazon have been dealing with this for years. I think they’ve been sharpening their tools on workers who aren’t as likely to push back.”

“Oh my god, my brother is talking about the universal rights of workers! Next thing I know you’ll be leading the union drive,” Dan needled his brother affectionately. He knew Keith had a good heart, but god it took a lot to bring it out.

“I know you think I don’t care about complicated stuff Dan, but I just like to think about it first. And I think Stamper’s ideas—which I love, by the way—have been co-opted by people like Cascade, people who think that only those at the very top should have autonomy and control, and that everybody ‘beneath’ should just snap to and do their jobs. If that makes me a union leader, sign me up.”

“I have not been co-opted,” objected Stamper, and she was about to go on but Keith cut her short.

“I did not say you have been co-opted,” said Keith. “I said your ideas have been co-opted, and I still think it’s not too late for you to take back control. Kate, I believe in you and I believe you have good intentions. You have my support.”

Before Stamper could respond, Christopher jumped in: “And you have mine too. I know I’ve bitched a lot, and I’ll keep bitching if things don’t improve, but I’ve pushed back on you because I still think you can make the best of your system, if you figure out how to back off just a bit.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere!,” said Dan. “Are we at a point where we can talk about how to help Stamper reel in this system and make it work the way it should?”

“Before we can talk about anything,” announced Stamper, “this girl’s gotta pee!” 

Keith just laughed—he was still reconciling himself to the idea that his “boss,” a title that once would have driven him to worshipful deference, was such a goofball, someone he could joke around with. And challenge.

“Well, while you empty, I’m gonna fill,” he said, walking right to the fridge. “Anyone else ready?”

He got Dan and Christopher another beer—and handed one to Stamper when she walked back in. 

“Up your alley,” said Dan, raising his beer bottle. 

“Up yours,” the others all said in unison. 

“Holy shit, you guys know this toast?” marveled Keith.

“Know it, Dan practically forced it on me,” said Christopher. 

“It took me years to learn it,” laughed Kate, “but hey, it kind of grows on you.” 

“It’s simple and very loving,” said Dan, “kind of like Stamper’s HD system should be ... if you guys figure out how to fix it.”

“Oh jeez Dan, do we have to get back to the serious stuff already?” said Christopher.

“Hey, it’s not up to me,” said Dan, “I’m just the arbitrator and I successfully kept you guys from murdering each other. I don’t give a shit what you talk about now!”

“Seriously though,” said Keith, “can we just bullshit about what we’d do to improve the system? I for one don’t want to lose our momentum.”

“I love you Keith!!!” laughed Stamper. “Of course I want to talk about it, as long as we keep our focus on turning people into robots!” She punched Christopher in the arm like he was her little brother.

“Well, since you’re willing to admit that’s your target,” parried Christopher, “the first thing we need to talk about is implants!”

“Breast implants?” asked Stamper.

“No,” scoffed Christopher, “chips that we implant in employees as a condition of accepting the employment agreement. Just a small chip, inserted in your temple. Forget about phishing and data protection rules—a chip will make it so that you’ll never violate an LP again. ‘Are Right, A Lot’? Hell, you’ve got no choice!”

“‘Learn and Be Curious’ ... or else,” Stamper volleyed.

“We might be able to just do away with ‘Disagree and Commit,’ once disagreeing becomes impossible!” Christopher laughed. 

Keith joined in: “‘Bias for Action’ is easy when you get a little shock if you hesitate!”

“What the hell are you guys talking about?” asked Dan. “It’s like you’ve slipped into some weird code language.”

“Sorry Dan,” said Keith, “we’re just riffing on the sacred Leadership Principles. I’ve told you about them, right? LPs?” 

“Oh yeah, right,” said Dan. “But if you can control these kinds of behaviors with a chip, why do you even need people at all? I mean, why not just hire robots? You’re kind of halfway there, with drones and self-driving vehicles and all the robots in the warehouses. I mean, it’s just one more step to bring this to all jobs ...”

“Holy shit, this is what you’re talking about, isn’t it Christopher?” asked Stamper, her expression now showing no sign of humor. 

“Yeah,” replied Christopher, “I guess it is. I mean, I know you aren’t planting chips, but when you figure out how to intervene in my thoughts before I complete them or at least before I can really act on them, it starts to feel like I no longer have a choice. I know I’ve exaggerated it, but I feel penned in, overdetermined, like I’m no longer capable of acting on my own. I fucking hate it.” 

“Can I tell you guys a quick story about my wife and an Amazon driver?,” said Keith. “You’re gonna laugh, but I think it will help.”

“It’s not kinky is it?” Stamper eyed him mock-suspiciously. 

“Oh god, no!” Keith blushed. “It’s not like that.”

“I’d love to hear it,” said Dan, “as long as I can give Lori shit about it!” 

“Could I stop you?” asked Keith. “Let me just tell it real quickly.”

“So my wife, Lori, is home alone a lot, and she gets a lot of Amazon deliveries. She tries to be friendly to the Amazon drivers, just making small chit-chat and stuff, but she complains to me that they will never stop and chat, and—and this is what really gets her—the main driver, Ken, will NOT accept one of the cookies she tries to give him.”

“Oooh, that must drive Lori nuts!” said Dan. “Cookies are her language of ... well, you know, friendship anyway.”

“I know, it’s like she tells people that she sees them by giving them a cookie,” continued Keith. “So anyway, she’s just stumped and kind of hurt that Ken and other drivers just won’t give her the time of day, and I tell her, they’re just doing their job, they’ve got timelines, don’t sweat it, but well, you guys know how it goes, you’re married,” he says to Dan and Christopher. “No offense Stamper, but you ladies tend to overthink things a little bit.” 

Stamper tried to look peeved but she couldn’t quite pull it off.

“So one day, back when Lori had broken her ankle, she was out walking around the neighborhood on her crutches! I told her to give it a break but she’s gotta have her morning walk. So she’s up near the top of the hill, near the end of the road that leads down into our subdivision, and she just bites it on some ice, falls on her ass, and one of her crutches goes skidding out into the road ... where it’s run over by a Prime van! The guy screeches to a halt and calls out, ‘Lady, are you okay?’ and Lori goes, ‘Ken, it’s me, Lori. Can you help me?’ And Ken says, ‘I’ll call 911,’ but Lori says, ‘No, no, can you just drive me down to my house? It will just take a second.’”

“You’d have to hear Lori describe this, but she says that he just looks at her like he’s trapped, like there’s some wild animal bearing down on him, and he looks up at the screen in his truck, and he calls out, ‘You’ll be okay, I gotta go,’ and then he just peels out, his rear wheels snapping Lori’s crutch in half as he rolls over it, but he’s not stopping, he’s zooming away. Lori can’t believe it! And she basically hobbles all the way home.”

“So we’re sitting in front of the fire that night and she’s telling me this story, and I’m being totally sympathetic ...” Keith continues.

“Not your natural state,” Dan inserts.

“Very funny Dan,” says Keith, “but it happens from time to time. And I was like, man, that’s really kicking a cookie lady while she’s down—Lori does not appreciate my joke—and just then there’s a knock at the door, and since Lori is hobbled I get up and get it. And guess who it is? It’s our Amazon driver, Ken! I don’t know him, I’m never there, but he introduces himself and he says, ‘Is the lady on crutches here?’ And Lori of course has heard this, and she comes up and just bursts into tears.” 

“Oh my god, you should have seen this poor guy! He does NOT know what to do, but he just starts apologizing like crazy, ‘Lady, I’m so sorry I couldn’t help you! I was already running late, and my Tracker was flashing at me, ‘Return to delivery! Return to delivery!’ and my numbers were already down this week ... I didn’t know what to do. So I just ran!’ And then he started crying, and Lori grabs hold of my shoulder to steady herself and she gives this guy a big hug and she says, ‘It’s okay, I’m okay.’ And they just stand there for a minute, hugging awkwardly, him saying ‘I’m sorry’ and her saying ‘It’s okay.’ Until finally she pulls back and says, ‘You need a cookie!’ And he says, ‘I’m off the clock now, I can have a cookie!’ and bursts out laughing.”

“And then we spend the next hour sitting at the table eating cookies and drinking milk, and Lori is pumping this guy for information about his wife and his kids and where he grew up, just standard chit chat stuff, and finally she asks, ‘How come you never want a cookie?’ And Ken sighs and says, ‘I love cookies ... but I can’t afford to stop to take one and I sure can’t eat one in the truck.’ And he explains to Lori—to both of us—that from the moment he clocks in in the morning every one of his actions is tracked and timed, and he’s constantly reminded, by the in-van Tracker and by his shift boss, if he falls below standard. Fall below standard too much, he says, and you’re gone. So he just can’t take the time. ‘I’d love to take more time to talk to my customers,’ he says, ‘and to have a cookie, but there’s just no time.’”

“And that,” says Keith, wrapping up his story, “is exactly how I think a lot of our people feel too. They want to be decent humans, to pick up the lady by the side of the road, but they’re too busy trying to optimize their time on task. We’ve got to find a better balance.”

“I don’t give a shit about being a decent human,” said Christopher, “I just want to do cool stuff, and being constantly reminded that this behavior doesn’t align with that LP, or that I’ve fallen off of some dumb-ass metric related to inclusiveness ... well, it doesn’t exactly make me want to deliver the packages on time, if you know what I mean! It makes me want to pee in the gas tank!”

“Okay, okay, I get it: we’re over-reaching,” said Stamper. “Message heard! But what do we do, strip out all the behavioral tracking and just go back to doing it all old school ... which didn’t work, by the way. The problem is, people like Cascade like what they see with this program—they like seeing the good metrics going up, the bad metrics going down. They don’t give a damn about how you feel, Christopher, or about helping some lady who has slipped on the ice.”

“Yeah, but how will they like it if all their expensive engineers and product managers decide they don’t want to put up with this and find other jobs?” asked Christopher. 

“And how will they like it if their warehouse workers and drivers unionize and insist on better working conditions?” added Keith, surprising himself by siding with Christopher. 

“Guys, can I offer an outside perspective?” asked Dan.

“Please!” they all said simultaneously.

“Stamper, within this system that you started, there’s still this beautiful idea, this beautiful impulse that we shouldn’t punish people by asking them to do a bunch of stuff they already know how to do. I totally see that what you wanted to do was set people free, free to avoid repetitive training, free to focus on the work that mattered to them.”

“But somewhere along the way it got twisted to try to do too much. You had the technology to do one thing, and it allowed you to do another thing, and pretty soon you’re dealing with the unintended consequences of technology and control run amok. You started by trying to diminish the time people spent on training and before you knew it you had created this monstrous surveillance machine.”

“I know why it happened—because you did enough to catch the interest of the folks who only care about profits and growth and control, and they twisted it to give them more, more, more.” 

“Now, the only thing I think you can do is to refuse to play the game this way. Take a stand on what you will and won’t monitor people about, and then leave people to be people. There are things that are going to be messier, because you’re going to have to rely on humans and they’re going to make mistakes and sometimes the way they resolve their differences are not going to be as neat and orderly as you’d like, and they may even take more time and reduce efficiency. But that messiness is what makes people feel like they’re human, that they’ve got the ability to make choices and make mistakes, and that their individuality is valuable. Recognize that you may have to value trust and humanity over profits and efficiency–people over dollars.”

“Jesus Christ Dan,” complained Christopher, “this is starting to remind me of those stretches of Atlas Shrugged where Ayn Rand gets all preachy—only you’re going in the opposite direction.”

“Oh my god, I haven’t thought of that one in a while!,” Dan laughed. “Look, I’m not trying to get preachy, I’m just saying the whole direction of your conversation tells you’ve got to turn the dial back on the level of surveillance and control you’re subjecting people to—and you’ve got to be ready to deal with the consequences.” 

“Which starts with me telling Cascade that we’re about to make some major changes to the system,” said Stamper. “We don’t have to specify what they are right now. In fact, we shouldn’t. We’ve got to start by opening ourselves up to feedback—to understanding what works, what really helps people, and what pisses them off. That means we’re going to have to gather a lot more data. Keith, that’s where you come in.”

“I do like the data!” said Keith. 

“And Christopher, we need some good, direct feedback from people who find the program ... uh, problematic.”

“I’m not running a focus group Stamper!,” objected Christopher. 

“I’m not asking you to run it, but my guess is you know a few other troublemakers in the company who you could convince to share their thoughts?”

“Do I!”

“So what if we pull you and your fellow anarchists onto a kind of advisory board to help ensure that whatever changes we make work for everybody?”

“You mean I get to bring my bitching into the light of day? As long as you can assure me this won’t become a witch hunt to find dissenters, I know people who will have good ideas,” said Christopher.

“There’ll be no witch hunts on my watch,” said Stamper. Now all she had to do was control Mitch Cascade.

< Next Chapter >

< Previous Chapter | First Chapter | Plot Summary | Next Chapter >

Cascade was pissed. Not only did this fucking analyst release these damned “friction reports” to the whole team, but Stamper told him she was taking two days “offline,” as she called it.

“You can’t go ‘offline,’ Stamper,” said Cascade when she told him that she was going to be out of touch for the weekend. “There’s no offline for Level 8s! You need to be accessible at all times!”

“Mitch, you know the newest LP about us being the best employer on earth? Well, that means sometimes we have to set work aside for a couple days. I’ve got some personal stuff I need to deal with. And it’s the weekend.”

“What personal stuff? What if you’re needed?”

“Mitch, I’m taking two days off!” she insisted.

“Nothing better happen!,” he groused. And as far as he knew, nothing happened.

Stamper wasn’t surprised to find Cascade waiting for her in her office when she arrived on Monday morning. But she was surprised to see him smiling, and for him to hand her a Starbucks cup. “It’s your favorite, Stamper: double mocha breve, extra hot.”

She had expected something different: when she fired up her phone after getting home on Sunday night, the notifications exploded across all channels: email, voicemail, Chime, Slack, even Messages and WhatsApp. Fully 75 percent of them were from Cascade, and they grew increasingly terse and angry:

“Stamper, I know you said you were going offline but give me a quick call. I want to talk about these reports your analyst produced.”

“Stamper, we need to discuss these friction reports. Call me.”

“Dammit Stamper, this is serious. I need you to reply.”

“Friction! What bullshit. I need you to shut it down!”

“CALL ME!!!”

On principle, she didn’t reply. He needed to know she had boundaries. 

When he said, “Good to see you Stamper, I hope you had a relaxing weekend,” she figured he must have decided to take a different approach than the full-on anger she had heard in his message. Still, she was wary.

“It was nice to step away,” she agreed.

“Where’d you go?” he inquired sweetly.

She cocked her head to the side and looked at him. What was he after? Had he discovered something about her trip?

“What?” he said, putting on his most innocent smile, “Can’t I inquire about your weekend?”

“I got your messages,” she replied.

“Oh boy, yeah, those,” he said, “I had kind of worked myself up, but then my wife reminded me that you probably just needed a little space. I’m really sorry about that.”

Stamper sensed a trap. She had never heard Cascade apologize for anything. But she had to give him a chance.

“Well ... thanks,” she said slowly. “Apology accepted. And, yeah, I had a good time. But I’m ready to be back to work.”

“Good, Stamper, good. But uh, did you think about work at all? Like, did you have any thoughts about those ... uh, those ... FUCK ... FUCK ... FUCK ... those FUCKING reports your goddamned tight-assed analyst put together?” He had tried to keep it cool, but now that was blown. He was hot, his hands balled into fists, pressed together in front of his chest. He glared at Stamper.

“Mitch,” she said as evenly as she could, “there’s a lot in those reports I don’t agree with ...”

“Good, I’m glad to hear it, so what are you going to ...” he blurted.

“Hold on Mitch,” she said, “there’s also some stuff in there that we need to consider carefully.”

“Bullshit! The only thing we need to consider is how fast we fire this guy.”

“We are not firing Keith Conn,” Stamper said slowly and deliberately. “Mitch, we need to look at what this data is telling us, to see what we can do to improve our program.”

“You’re being too soft, Stamper, don’t you see? This Keith guy may act like he’s on your team, but he’s trying to fuck you. He’s trying to fuck you!!! He wants people to see that they can question you and get away with it. If you don’t shut it down RIGHT NOW, you’ve lost. Lost! You’ve got to make an example of this guy and assert your leadership! If you don’t do it, I will.” 

“Mitch, that’s not how I lead! And you can’t fire my direct report.”

“What are you going to do, coddle this little weasel?”

“I was going to discuss it with him. He’s got some good points in there, stuff we need to consider.” 

“That’s weakness Stamper! You can’t show weakness!”

“Mitch, I’m trying to build people up, build their capacity. I’m not trying to establish dominance.”

“Big mistake! I’d fire him this morning, and announce to the team that he had released fabricated data. In fact, you’ve got an all-hands coming up soon, you could do it there.”

“First, it’s not fabricated ... and if what it shows is true, then we need to consider some adjustments in our program. Second, there is no case in which I’d use an all-hands to announce that we’ve fired someone, for god’s sake. Mitch!!”

“Since we’re numbering our points, Stamper,” Mitch growled with an unusual ferocity, “let me take a shot. First, true is what you say is true. You’re in charge—you’re the boss. Second, the best way to keep your team in line is to show them what you’re capable of. If it were me, I’d say that data was falsified, fire the guy, and get on with the program. I guarantee you any pushback would disappear overnight. You’ve got to toughen up. We’re trying to build perfect Amazonians!,” and only there did his face shift back to the wolfish grin that sat so comfortably on his face.

“That’s just not me Mitch. I couldn’t look my employees in the eye after pulling those moves,” said Stamper.

“Yes, Stamper, you could!” asserted Cascade. “It’s called leadership! You are the leader—you get to decide what’s true, and show people you’re willing to enforce it. When you’re strong, people follow.”

Stamper looked into Cascade’s eyes. He was one of the smartest people she had run into, and one of the most charismatic. His physical presence and his smile were electric, instantly persuading nearly everyone he met that he was in charge, that he should be followed. But the more she got to know him, the more she worked with him, she also saw that he had an insatiable appetite for control and dominance. He wanted to exert control over others by force of will, and he wanted her to do the same. Was this what it took to be a leader? Or were these the traits of a psychopath?

“Mitch, I know you want me to succeed, and I really appreciate you being so candid with me, but I need to think about it,” she replied.

“What’s there to think about Stamper, just do it!,” he grinned insistently.

“I just need to think about how to do it my way, to be sure that I can project leadership in ways my team will find authentic,” she explained.

“Fine Stamper, but do it soon! Time’s a wasting!” He flashed her a big thumbs up, beamed his maniacal grin, and walked out the door. She knew she didn’t have long.

< Next Chapter >

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“Why is this so hard?” laughed Stamper, half in frustration. She was 10 minutes into a phone call with Christopher that came directly after the verbal override they had just participated in. It wasn’t going well.

“Look, I’m not trying to be difficult, but I’m not talking about this stuff at work or on the phone,” said Christopher. “It needs to be away from the prying eyes and ears of HD.”

“We’re not prying!” insisted Stamper. She didn’t like feeling defensive, but she identified pretty strongly with HD at this point. “We’re trying to help.” 

They’d been going around and around on this one.

“I’m trying to help too—I’m trying to help you not be the fucking Gestapo! If you want to talk, it’s gotta be without any electronic devices, in an area where I’m sure there’s no connection. That’s the deal,” Christopher held firm.

“Or else what?,” Stamper refused to be bullied. “You’re going to keep being a pain in the ass, doing everything you can to turn people against us?” She didn’t like being backed against the wall.

“Look, Stamper, I’m not trying to be a pain in the ass,” said Christopher, then he reconsidered. “Okay, maybe a little! But I’m not trying to turn people against you. I just don’t think you see what you’re doing. And I’m telling you, if you want anything more from me about it, you’ll do it on my terms.”

Stamper sighed. She knew she could force his hand—demand that he appear with his manager in a performance review. As the head of HD, she had that power. Hell, she could probably work with Christopher’s manager to get him dismissed—he had enough taps and enough tap escalations for them to execute on a termination today. That was what Cascade would tell her to do, if she asked.

But deep down, she knew there was something to Christopher’s response to HD monitoring and she wanted to hear it. Dan had predicted it long ago, and even Keith—who wasn’t exactly the empathetic, sensing type—could see the problems it was creating for some people. And she still wanted it to work! Maybe, just maybe, if she acquiesced to Christopher’s demands, his input could help guide her to a workable solution. Christopher might be pissing her off, but she had to acknowledge that he was a smart, innovative guy—the kind of person she wanted to work with, the kind of colleague who should make Amazon a great place to work.

“Christopher,” she said, her voice softening. “I really want to hear where you’re coming from, so I’ll do it. Tell me the where and the when, and I’ll make it work.”

“Good!,” said Christopher. “I’m glad. I’m not your enemy Kate.”

“I know,” Stamper replied.

“But I can’t tell you the time and location over the phone ...”

“Oh shit, really?”

“Yeah, really. That’s how it is at this point! Keep your eyes out—I’ll get you the details.”

“How? What do you mean keep your eyes out?”

“I mean, I’m going to get you the details of our meetup, but I’m not telling you how. Trust me, you won’t be able to miss it.”

“Jesus, it sounds like something out of a spy novel!” Stamper laughed. 

“Don’t I know it, or Sci-Fi,” barked Christopher, no humor in his voice. “It sucks. I’ll talk to you soon.” And he hung up.

Two days later, sitting at her desk, Stamper heard the distinctive sound of the window washers making their way along the building and toward her office. Clomp, squeeeeege, pause. Clomp, squeeeeege, pause.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the window washer guy shuffle over and approach her window. She gave him a friendly wave.

Clomp, squeeeeege, pause. 

Long pause.

Noting the break in the window washer’s rhythm, Stamper looked over at him. He was holding up a hand-drawn note, scrawled on a piece of cardboard. It said: “Swale Canyon Trailhead. 10 AM. October 7.” 

The window washer looked at her directly. He flashed her a questioning thumbs up. She nodded and returned the thumbs up, then scrawled the meetup location down on a sticky pad.

When she looked back up, he was still standing there, but he had flipped over this sign. It read: “Leave your phone at home.” She nodded to signal that she had read it. He folded the sign up, tucked it into his work belt, and went on with his work.

Clomp, squeeeeege, pause. 

Then he was gone.

Where the hell is the Swale Canyon Trailhead, thought Stamper, turning to her computer ... before pulling up short. Better to look it up later, she thought. 

Crap, she thought to herself. Now I’m starting to worry about being watched!

And that’s how it went for the next several days: when she least expected it—when she went to get a coffee, when she retrieved her bike from the basement bike storage, and, in a touch that could only have come from Christopher, when she went to the bathroom and pulled down on the toilet paper roll—she’d get messages stating the terms of the meetup.

She followed them all.

“Well,” thought Stamper as she pulled into the dusty parking lot, eying the ratty looking outhouse she’d been told to look out for, “this sure as hell is remote!”

The Swale Canyon Trailhead sat down in a web of dry, steep canyons that lay between the Columbia River to the south and the rising forests leading up to Mount Adams to the north and west. It followed an old rail bed that had once connected the towns of Lyle and Goldendale, back when there was a reason to connect them. But that reason was long gone, and the stretch of the trail that Christopher picked quickly left any semblance of civilization and entered a narrow, steep, and scrubby canyon that stubbornly resisted the incursion of any cell phone signal. They were more likely to run into rattlesnakes, ticks, or poison oak than people.

Stamper had been standing looking at the signs at the trailhead for several minutes when she heard the crunching of feet on gravel behind her, and she turned around to see Christopher approaching on foot. He had easily put on 30 pounds since she had seen him last and his hair and beard had grown long and kind of scraggly. But he still had that mischievous gleam in his eye that she remembered from the first day she met him, when he had come in to Wizards a 24-year-old kid. He just had an energy about him that few people could resist—her included.

“Geez, Stamper, it’s so good to see you,” he smiled as he stepped up and wrapped her in a big hug. “I’m going to give you a lot of shit, but I still like you a lot!” That was Christopher: positive, direct, and straight to the point. 

“And I’m going to give you shit back,” laughed Stamper, truly glad to see him. “It doesn’t look like you’re missing any meals!”

“I’m married and we love to cook, what can I say?,” he laughed. “And I’ve got two kids! Can you fucking believe it?” And in that way—rushing, ribbing each other—they caught up, quickly bridging the gap of years that separated them.

As the words slowed, Stamper looked around and said, “Hey wait, where’s your car? How did you get here?”

“It’s ... nearby,” Christopher said. “I got here earlier so I could see you drive up and watch you before I approached.”

Stamper tilted her head, furrowed her brow, and squinted at him. “Seriously?” She wasn’t sure if he was giving her shit or not.

“Hell yes!” he replied. “Do you know how many times I thought I’ve gotten outside the range of Amazon’s monitoring only to hear a ping from my phone? I wanted to make damn sure you didn’t have anyone else following you, or you didn’t try to make a phone call.”

“Christopher!” she said with as much gravity as she could, “I didn’t tell anyone I was coming, I used a paper map, and I left my phone at home—just like all your little messages told me! I haven’t been this off the grid in years.”

“Oh shit, hold on,” he said, suddenly remembering something. Christopher pulled a mirror on a stalk from his pack, then got down on his knees and held the mirror under her car, moving around it from all sides. Satisfied there were no trackers, he stood up and gestured to her to hold her arms out to her sides.

“Oh c’mon, you’re gonna frisk me?” She asked.

He held his finger upright to his lips: “Shh.” And then he quickly checked her clothes for any presence of a wire, a bug, an AirTag. He didn’t really know what he was doing, only that he wanted to be damned sure he wasn’t being monitored. 

“Okay,” he offered a conciliatory smile. “Let’s walk!” And he started off past the metal gate and down the path, with Stamper shaking her head and following him.

“You’re taking this pretty seriously,” she chided him.

“Hold on,” he said. “Not yet.”

“Not yet what?” She asked.

“Not until we get into the canyon,” he replied, hastening his pace, forcing her to keep up.

Before long, they rounded the bend into a steep rocky canyon, walking along an old trail bed that had clearly been blasted into existence.

“Okay,” he said, stopping and setting his pack down so that he could grab a water bottle for both of them. “I’m pretty sure we’re safe to talk here.”

“Goddammit Christopher,” Stamper replied, exasperated, “we were safe to talk in my office! I just think you’re making ...”

“No!,” said Christopher, “you don’t get to tell me I’m making too much of it. I’ve heard that, from my wife and from Dan, and I’ve even tried to believe it myself. I am not a paranoid person—but I’ve hit my limit.”

“Christopher, you know me: I just want to make it easier for you, for everybody, to get their work done.”

“Yeah, yeah, I heard that at the beginning and I bought it. I even liked it,” said Christopher.

“I know, it’s great isn’t it? I mean, we stripped away all that required stuff that people had to sit through, and all the stupid, repetitive annual training ...”

“You don’t have to give me the pitch! It all sounds good ... until you try to live inside it. Until you sit there and you’re trying to do your work and along comes this freaking tap, asking me if I really want to send that email or some bullshit.” 

“But it keeps you from doing stuff you shouldn’t do and don’t even want to do!,” Stamper interjected. She’d seen the reports about how much they’d curbed negative communication over the past months. Their count on instances of words on their banned list showed huge improvements ...

“You know who should keep me from doing stuff I shouldn’t do? I should! My conscience. My character! But when you and fucking Huddy are all in my business, reading every word I write, listening to every word I say, you make me feel like I’m in a cage!”

“You’re not in a cage! And we don’t keep you from writing anything Christopher, we just keep you from sending it,” explained Stamper. 

“Oh, I know—I’ve had my work held up mid-stream, several times, and not just because I told someone not to be a pain in the ass, but also for a bunch of stupid crap, like I’m not ‘earning trust’ or I’m not ‘thinking big.’ It’s like your system has one image for how an employee should think and act, and if I don’t fit the image, I get whacked into shape.”

“Nobody is whacking you Christopher! I think you’re just exaggerating the hell out of this because you don’t like to be corrected.”

“Oh yeah, I don’t like to be corrected. I’m pretty damned smart and I make good decisions—that’s why they hired me for fuck’s sake! That’s why they hired everyone here–but when you start second-guessing everything a reasonably smart and confident person thinks or writes, they start to feel like they’re inside some kind of nightmare.”

“God darn it, why do you guys always have to go to these dark places about this stuff? You’re watching too much Sci-Fi.”

“Oh give me a break ...” Christopher blurted, but Stamper shushed him.

“Hold on,” she said, “let me finish. I’m not trying to smother anyone! I want to REMOVE the obstacles to you doing the best possible work. I want you to be MORE productive, MORE satisfied with your work. I want to use our system to predict the obstacles you’ll encounter and remove them! Human Dynamics is for you! We’re creating the future of work.”

They had been walking further and further into the canyon, so engrossed in their conversation that they barely noticed the passing scenery—the rushing river off to their left, the way the walls of the canyon narrowed and widened.

Suddenly, Christopher stopped, and put his hands on his hips, and shook his head side to side.

“God,” he exhaled. “I wondered if you were this far gone! Do you even hear yourself?”

“What are you talking about? What do you mean, ‘this far gone?’” she demanded.

“I mean this deep into the power trip,” he jabbed. “You’ve figured out a way to deploy technology to make everyone dance like a fucking puppet ... wait, it’s more techy than that. You’ve created a digital avatar of me and you’re intent on electro-shocking me in the direction of your view of perfection! And then you shake your head and wonder why the puppets don’t like to have their strings pulled! Don’t you even wonder what it’s like to be on the other side of this machine you’ve created?”

“Oh Christopher, for god’s sake, quit thinking you’re so precious. You’re so committed to being the golden boy that you just can’t take a little correction. I’ve seen your Pulse Reports, you know: you click on phishing stuff all the same; you’re insensitive to anyone who doesn’t agree with you; and you’re all over the map on applying the LPs. If anyone needs what we’re doing, it’s you!” 

“So, it’s just me huh? I’m the problem?” 

“I’ve never heard anyone else say this crap before.”

“So, you’ve never heard anyone say that proactively telling people what to read and what to say and what to think is creepy? C’mon Kate!”

“What I’ve heard is a few people who don’t want to change or who don’t want to do just a little work or a little self-examination complain when their problems are pointed out to them! You’re the first person who has ever said directly to me, ‘I don’t like this.’”

“I think you’ve got your head in the sand,” Christopher charged.

“And I think you’re a baby!” returned Stamper. 

They glared at each other.

Then Christopher sighed, deeply. Stamper was smart and stubborn and fierce, just as he remembered her. That’s why he liked her so much. But so was he! How did they work their way out of this?

“Kate, we’re stuck,” said Christopher. 

She looked around—she had been paying so little attention to their surroundings that she thought they might be stuck on the trail. But they weren’t: the trail kept weaving through the arid canyon. Then she realized what Christopher meant and she laughed.

“God, aren’t we?” she cried. “I don’t want to be!”

“How do we keep from butting heads on this?” 

“You can just agree that the system I’ve designed is awesome and quit resisting!,” she smiled. 

“Or you could just admit that what you’re doing is creepy and scale back all the surveillance?” he parried. They both laughed.

For a while, they just walked, listening to the babble of the river rippling by. Finally, she said: “Funny, I always thought we were kind of after the same things. How are we so far apart on this?”

“I know! We’re both pretty dug in,” he agreed. “But Stamper, you’ve got to see this isn’t working! You’ve seen those reports. It’s not just me who’s pissed. I think you’re sitting on a powder keg of resentment that’s building up.”

“Powder keg? I doubt that,” sighed Stamper, “but I know we need to make some changes. There’s got to be a middle ground.” And she knew just who she needed to bring into the conversation: Keith. If anybody was “middle ground,” it was Keith Conn.

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Keith worked on his next set of reports for two solid weeks. To the surprise of Kate Stamper and the great irritation of Mitch Cascade, he refused to deliver anything at all on the Monday following, telling them that there was just too much data to churn through. Cascade was pissed—he wanted obedience. Stamper was pleased—she liked the backbone. Keith promised them that it would be worth their wait.

Come Monday morning, there they were: paper copies on the desks of Stamper and Cascade, and, to the surprise of everyone who had ever worked with the guarded, careful Keith Conn, a link to the reports (and to all the data behind the reports) on the HD-All Slack channel, with this note:

“In order to engage the best thinking of the entire Human Dynamics team, I present here what I’m calling the ‘Friction Reports.’ I’ll leave it to all of you to determine whether any of this data reshapes the delivery of our services.”

Cascade pored over the reports before he even turned his computer on. These are nice reports, nice reports, was his first thought. We’re delivering taps across nearly all of the target behaviors, that’s good. But what’s this shit: tap friction? What the hell is tap friction? I’ve gotta dig deeper on that. He kept paging through, there were a dozen pages of reports. What’s this? Tap friction is up, all over the place. We’ve got to put a stop to that. What the hell is this? “Positive correlation between team productivity and friction”? How the hell can that be? Why would Keith even look for that? I thought he was a team player. I’ve gotta go see Stamper  …

Stamper too grabbed the printouts as soon as she walked in her office door. She too was happy that they were delivering taps across 20 different behavioral categories now, including most of the Leadership Principles. That meant that they were succeeding at identifying the signs of mis-aligned behavior. But what she noticed was that the more they tapped based on the Leadership Principles, the more the “friction” went up. Friction, she thought, what an interesting way to think about it! It did seem to create friction for some people and we need to consider that—maybe there’s a better way to deal with this stuff. Then she got to the sections comparing friction and performance. Wow, she thought, those teams that generated the most friction are the best performers—that’s weird! I’ve got to dig into that one … 

Christopher didn’t get a printout and he wasn’t on the HD-All Slack channel, but a friend tipped him off to it and he popped into the channel to check it out. He breezed right through the first few pages. No shit, we’re buried in taps, I could have told you that. But then he got to the first report showing “friction,” and he was pleased to see that while his team was the earliest to show friction, friction was showing up all over the place. You’re damn right there’s friction! He thought. We’re sick of being jerked around with these stupid taps all over the place. Hell, it’s amazing productivity’s up, given how much we get interrupted. But he also knew that his team had started to rally together to do better, just to show them that you didn’t have to always go “by the book” to do a good job. What’d they hire us for? He’d say to his teammates, when he knew they weren’t being recorded. To follow the rules or to think?

Keith was just relieved: he had finally churned through every bit of data he could, and had gained enough traction to feel like he could allow the data to tell a story. And the story it told was that taps worked  … up to a point. But when they went too far—and honestly, he wasn’t sure how to define too far yet—-their effectiveness started to reverse and they just created friction. 

The only problem, Keith thought, was that the term friction didn’t really capture quite what was going on. It sure as hell didn’t capture how Christopher Dourado was responding to taps! There was resistance, even open hostility. And they needed to get a handle on that before Cascade did.

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Stamper wanted to act fast with Christopher, if only so she’d have a better sense of how to handle Cascade. She just didn’t figure she had all that much time before implacable Mitch Cascade drilled his way down to Christopher.

Given how pushy Christopher had been on the phishing thing—and what Keith had told her about some of his other resistance—she was hoping she could cherry pick one of the LPs to tap him on, maybe find something where he’d have to acknowledge that he could do better. She knew Chrisopher was arrogant as hell—and deservedly so. The dude was smart. But he was all too quick to assume that he knew more than everybody else, and she thought maybe that would be an area where he would admit he could improve. 

If I could just tag him on “Learn and Be Curious,” she thought, he couldn’t resist that. Or “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit.” Surely he’d acknowledge that he could improve here. 

But she had to take what was there, and when she and Keith both got an alert in the middle of the next day, she knew they had to take it.

“Tap Alert,” said the notification that popped up simultaneously on her and Keith’s screens. “Christopher Dourado has triggered an LP tap on ‘Earn Trust.’ Will you accept the tap override?” 

She had a few seconds to decide, knowing that Christopher would get an automated tap if she didn’t jump in pretty quickly. So she tapped Accept and Keith, who had been working in the empty office next door to hers, tucked into her office and closed the door. They had agreed that he’d write the messages, since he had a better sense of the way their chatbot syntax was constructed. He sat down at her computer.

“Hi Christopher, sorry to interrupt your meeting.”

“Look, can we do this later?” Christopher typed quickly. “My team needs my help in this meeting.”

“That’s why we tapped you Christopher. You seem to be missing a chance to ‘Earn Trust’ with your colleagues on the Dev team.”

“Not now!” muttered Christopher. He tried to Alt-X to close the chat window and return to his meeting, but he had long ago had this privilege lifted. This was only available to people with less than two taps a quarter. “Fuck!” he grumbled. So he typed his reply: “Got it, ‘Earn Trust,’ I’ll do better. But I don’t have time for you to re-educate me on the LPs right now. Just let me get back to this meeting!”

Keith and Stamper looked at each other—should they just let it go? 

“Please?” typed Christopher.

Neither Keith nor Stamper were in this to bust people. They both prized collegiality and cooperation—it’s what had led them into this division in the first place. But they both sensed that Christopher was a growing problem that they had to contain. Stamper looked Keith in the eye and shook her head no.

Keith started typing right away:

“I’m sorry, Christopher. ‘Earn Trust’ is too important. Your team will do fine without you. After all, we ‘Hire and Develop the Best,’ and your team, like you, is ‘Right, A Lot.’”

Stamper had to admit that Keith could sling the LPs with the best of them. Like many Amazonians, she sometimes felt like the most prized skill at Amazon was the ability to manipulate LPs to get your way. After all, they couldn’t really be questioned, though they could be shaped to mean almost anything.

The three-dot typing bubble told them that Christopher was shaping a reply, but then a pop-up window appeared on their screen: Verbal Override Requested.

They’d installed the Request Verbal Override button fairly recently, after getting several complaints about people being frustrated by interactions with the chatbot. Keith was sure that several of the complaints came from Christopher. They just sounded like him. Still, it had been an easy enough feature to install in their chat module and it was barely used. Keith’s team found that most people just wanted to end the exchange and get back to work. But not Christopher.

Keith prepared to click Accept Verbal Override, but Stamper put her hand on his forearm. “You’ve got to do the talking, Keith. He’ll know it’s me.” 

“Don’t worry, I’ve got the voice masking on—it converts everything we say into Huddy’s voice,” said Keith.

“I know,” she replied, “I’m just worried that he’ll know my phrasing, or something. I just can’t do it.” Stamper couldn’t believe it was her saying these words—she didn’t back away from anything. But having this be her first conversation with Christopher in years was just too much. “Please?”

“Fine, no problem,” said Keith. “We better start now or the system will deny the override.” And he clicked the button.

“C’mon guys,” said Christopher. “Don’t you have any sense of when you’ve gone too far?”

“Hello Christopher, I’m part of the HD team,” replied Keith in as neutral a tone as possible ... though his neutrality was hardly needed, since Huddy voice masking did the neutralizing for him. “We’re just trying to help you be the best Amazonian you can be.” 

Keith wasn’t this soulless—this was the standard HD script for when interactions with employees got a little testy. In fact, his heart was beating fast and he was concentrating hard to try to guide this to a decent outcome. How he wished he could confer with Stamper about what that outcome should be!

“Has it ever occurred to you motherfuckers that trying to squeeze people into a little box wasn’t going to make them the best fucking Amazonians!” growled Christopher. “This is getting ridiculous.”

“We want to help you improve on ‘Earns Trust,’” replied Keith, trying to steer this away from confrontation. He wasn’t going to argue with Christopher.

“I’ll tell you how you can help me improve on ‘Earns Trust,’” Christopher shot back. “You can let me talk directly to whoever is running this shit show. Because they need to hear that it’s NOT FUCKING WORKING.”

Keith looked at Stamper, mouthing the words “What do I say?” They were so far from the scripts, and so very far from Keith’s capacity to handle confrontation. Keith was nearly paralyzed. Stamper thought she saw tears in his eyes.

“Hello???” said Christopher sarcastically. “Did I throw you off your canned bullshit responses?”

“I’ll take it,” said Stamper—and the voice masking did its job.

“You’ll take what?” asked Christopher. 

Stamper clicked the button on the console to turn off voice masking. 

“Christopher,” she said, her unmasked voice a blend of warmth and sadness, anger and resignation, “it’s Kate Stamper. I’d be happy to talk with you.”

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The night after their meeting with Cascade, Keith had a dream. He was under water, deep enough for it to be dark around him, and he had to get to the surface. He kicked and thrashed, struggling to get to the surface, but it seemed like he couldn’t get any closer to the light overhead. It was like he couldn’t get any purchase on the water around him.

“Keith, Keith, it’s okay,” said Lori, stroking his head.

“I can’t reach it,” said Keith, confused and groggy. “I can’t get there.”

“Where Keith?” said Lori softly. “It’s just a dream honey.” 

“Oh, god, I couldn’t move, couldn’t get to the surface ...” The dream was starting to fade, it didn’t make any sense. “Oh shit, that was weird.” 

“What was weird babe? Is something bugging you?” She sometimes wondered if his work was more stressful than he let on.  

“I don’t know, I just have a lot of data I have to churn, got to feed reports to Cascade,” Keith replied, sounding more and more like himself.

“Who’s Cascade?” asked Lori.

“Just a top boss at work. No big deal, just normal stuff,” Keith replied. “Go back to sleep babe; sorry I woke you.” Keith turned over.

In the days that followed, Keith drowned himself in the data: he grabbed hold of every data stream he could find, and tried to lay disparate data strings alongside each other, to see if he could see trends, correlations, anomalies—anything that would help make better sense of what was going on over in Christopher’s org, but also, in subtle ways, in other orgs across the company.

There was just so damn much data: not just the tap logs, where he could see who had been tapped and for what reason, but also the meeting and chat logs, full records of conversations and reactions. He could ask their AI crawler to identify “hot spots” of resistance in this sea of words, and he could do searches on some of the key terms he had identified as signaling a reluctance of people to accept the direction, and then map that against other data ... but it was complicated and he didn’t know if he could defend or explain some of what he was seeing.

He thought he could see trends emerging: it seemed that one or two people in a group or team led the way in resisting taps ... but was he really ready to call it resisting? He remembered as a boy when he tried to put a bit in the mouth of a horse, the horse chomped and puckered and chewed around the sudden intrusion of metal in its mouth, uncomfortable with this sudden attempt to dictate direction. But then they got used to the feel of the bit in their mouth and it all worked out. There seemed to be a similar ... chafing against the direction provided by their system, and it took the form of exasperation, frustration, reluctant acquiescence ... a whole bunch of soft words that he could never quite figure out how to put on a graph.

What he needed, he thought, was a way of directly assessing what all these vague forms of resistance meant. He needed to be able to ask questions, direct questions, about what people were thinking when they got taps, or when those taps escalated, or when they were required to actually take some training as a result of those taps ... there was a lot! But he couldn’t insert these questions into the Pulse stream without drawing Cascade’s ire.

He was trapped, and he couldn’t get out. He needed help, but he wasn’t ready to go to Stamper. Perhaps he could talk to his brother. Dan seemed to kind of enjoy this kind of uncertainty. Weirdo.

“You want to talk about work?” Dan said incredulously. Keith never wanted to talk about work.

“I know, I know,” said Keith. “This may be your kind of thing though. Meet me at The Bine at 5:00.”

After they’d ordered their beers—lager for Keith, double IPA for Dan—Keith caught Dan up on the “friendship” he was forming with Stamper, his “encounters” with Christopher, and his perspective on the battering ram that was Mitch Cascade. 

Keith expected it would all be new to Dan, but it wasn’t, not all of it anyway. As Dan cued him to what he already knew from his hikes with Stamper and his infrequent chats with Christopher, Keith grew even more comfortable being fairly open with what he was seeing. 

“Here’s where I’m stuck Dan,” he said. “I can see that there’s something brewing under all these reactions to our taps, but I just don’t know how to quantify it. I need something hard to say about it!” 

“Why do you have to quantify it?” I asked.

“Because that’s all that matters at Amazon: is there data?”

“But Keith, there’s more there than data ... even you, Mr. Datahead, can feel it!”

“I know, but how do I get to it?”

“You feel it man! It’s not that hard.”

“Honestly, Dan, I don’t even know how to do that!”

“Keith, have you ever been tapped?”

“Well yeah, sure ... but just the all-hands taps, you know, the stuff everybody gets.”

“How did it feel?”

“I mean, fine, right, I know everybody is getting it.”

“But not good?” Dan asked.

“Well, you usually get them when you’re in the middle of something ...” replied Keith.

“And you don’t like to be interrupted?”

“Right. But it’s just a nuisance.”

“So how do you think you’d feel if you got a corrective tap?”

“I don’t get corrective taps!” Keith replied, a tiny bit indignantly.

“That’s because you’re such a company man, you dork!” Dan kidded him. “But let’s just say you’re working away on your data analysis, and you get a tap that says, oh, I don’t know, like: ‘It’s time to work on monthly business review now, Dan. Remember, it’s important to ‘Deliver Results.’”

“Are you kidding me? I’d be pissed. I know how to prioritize my work!”

“So what would you do if you got that tap?”

“Well, I’d probably ignore it. Like, I’d hit Defer, and get to it later.” 

“But you could only do that once or twice and the system would force your hand, right? That’s how you guys have set it up?”

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t get tapped twice!” said Keith.

“Let’s say you did.”

“Okay, yeah, well, I’d be pissed. I guess I’d have to do it, but I wouldn’t like it.” 

“So Keith, what you’re having here are feelings, and you have to know that everyone who is getting taps is having these feelings, and some of them are going to be a lot stronger than yours. I mean, the thing that’s always bothered me about Stamper’s system is that people just don’t like to be monitored and they don’t like to be constrained in how they can make decisions.”

“But it’s for the good of the company! We have lots of data to show how much more productive and efficient ...”

“Give me a fucking break. I get that’s the party line, but that’s just not how most people think or work. That’s what this data is telling you! It’s telling you that people don’t like these intrusions! They don’t like to be watched and they don’t like to be told what to do.”

“So, as usual, my smart big brother can easily see what we’re doing wrong! Typical! I don’t even know why I wanted to talk to you,” harrumphed Keith.

“Dude, I’m not trying to be mister know-it-all, I swear,” Dan replied. “It just seems to me that you guys may be pushing up against the limits of what people will tolerate, and they’re telling you in the only way they know how—by grumbling and chafing and mis-directing and resisting. All that weird data you’re seeing, that you can’t quite get your finger on? That’s friction man, that’s human beings being human beings, not machines.”

Keith looked at me long and hard. He wrapped both hands around his beer glass and squeezed it hard—I could see the edges of his fingers turning white with the pressure. “You called it friction,” he said, almost under his breath. “That’s good”

“I don’t get it,” said Dan.

“I’ve been thinking of it as resistance, but if I call it resistance, Cascade will hit the roof,” said Keith. “‘We can’t tolerate resistance!’ he’ll say. But friction—that is something I can work with!”

< Next Chapter >

< Previous Chapter | First Chapter | Plot Summary | Next Chapter >

Cascade leafed through the folder of reports Stamper had handed him.

Man, these are nice reports, he thought. Super clear. I wish all reports were this clear.

He walked down the hall, paging through the printout. Cascade printed stuff out because he couldn’t stand being chained to his computer. He wanted to keep moving.

He was walking along, not looking up, but then he turned to the first graph, which compared tap rates among the different product teams in core services. Everything went along normally until one team started a steady deviation upward. He stopped in the middle of the hall. 

What the hell is this? Why are tap rates going up on this one team? Who’s the manager there? I’ll straighten ‘em out.

Distracted, he flipped forward, to a drill-down Total Tap Report on the one team whose tap rate had been trending upward.

What the fuck? Cascade fumed. This team is out of control! Stamper should do something about this team. If she can’t, I will. Why the hell aren’t the corrective taps working here? It’s like these people are actively resisting our taps. We can’t have that. But then he looked up, surprised to find himself at the meeting he was joining. He smiled as he entered the room.

Ten minutes later, Cascade sat there, paying no attention to conversation around him. He couldn’t stop fuming about these reports.

There better be a report on the individuals on this team, he thought, paging forward. Oh, yeah, here it is. What’s this de-identified bullshit? I don’t need person 1, person 2. I want names! Damn, person 7 is way out there—he’s got twice as many taps as anyone else, and they just keep coming. We should fire this person. He turned the page to the graph labeled “Taps Over Time.” What the hell? Person 7’s taps go up, and then everyone else on his team starts to go up as well. Who is this guy? Goddammit, I want names. I’m not going to put up with this shit. 

“Mitch?” said the guy next to him, he couldn’t remember his name.

“Yeah, what is it?” barked Cascade.

“The meeting is over, a new group is coming in,” the guy said.

“Oh sure, sure,” said Cascade, as if he knew it. “I’m a little caught up in something!” 

He kept the folder open in front of him as he walked out the door—and nearly walked right into Kate Stamper. “Stamper, holy shit, these reports ...”

“Mitch,” Stamped hissed. “I’ve got my whole team coming in. Not right now.”

“We need to talk about this! Can they meet without you?” he demanded.

“No!” Stamper insisted. “I’ll catch you afterward.” 

“It better be soon Stamper,” he growled, then realized Stamper’s whole team was queued up in the hall, waiting for them to clear the door. He turned on his wolf grin. “Hi everybody, keep up the great work. Gotta go.” 

Stamper caught Keith’s eye. They had both noticed the reports in Cascade’s hands. 

As Stamper’s meeting ended, there was Cascade at the door. As soon as people stood up, Cascade opened the door and walked in. “Stamper, I noticed you didn’t have a meeting after this one, can we talk?” he asked, beaming as if this was the most normal thing to do. “And how about the person who created these great reports?” He held up the folder of reports. “Are they in this group? Can they stay too?” He looked around, smiling, to see who it would be.

Keith waved: “That’s me, I can stay.”

Cascade waited as the room emptied, all the while smiling at people as they left, keeping up a constant patter of “good to see you,” “keep up the good work,” “go get ‘em.” Then he closed the door.

“Mitch Cascade,” he said, stepping toward Keith and extending his hand. “These are great reports, really clear.”

“Thanks a lot, Mr. Cascade,” said Keith. “I’m Keith Conn.”

“Keith, call me Mitch,” said Cascade, then the smile dropped. “These reports look great ... but this data is bullshit,” he fumed. 

“Sir, I went over the data several times, I swear it’s accurate,” said Keith. “I can tell you how I ...”

“I’m not saying it’s not accurate,” interjected Cascade. “I’m saying it’s intolerable. I want to know what you’re doing about it?”

“Sir, I ...” stammered Keith.

“Mitch,” Stamper interrupted, “it’s not Keith’s job to do anything about this data!”

“Then whose is it?” barked Cascade. “We’ve clearly got people—and you’re going to get me their names!—who are resisting the taps, and from what I can tell, we’ve got one person—Person 7!—,” he said sarcastically, “who seems to be single-handedly increasing resistance to our efforts across his entire team. I want to know who’s going to fix it!”

“That would be my job Mitch, mine and the managers,” said Stamper, redirecting Cascade’s heat toward herself. 

“So why aren’t you doing it?” demanded Cascade.

“Because we want to understand the problem first!” asserted Stamper.

“What’s not to understand: this guy is trouble. Get rid of him!” 

“It’s not that simple.”

“Make it that simple!”

“Mitch, I’m not going to insist that this guy be fired!”

“Why not? If those reports reveal what I think they do, you’ve got people who think they can get away with resisting what you’re doing. There’s only one way to handle this: show him and everyone else who’s boss. If you won’t do it, I will.”

“You know it’s not that simple,” said Stamper. “We’ve got to notify him of the problem, put him on a Performance Improvement Plan, give him time to improve ...”

“Bullshit! Bullshit!,” Cascade pounded his hand on the desk. “Not for insubordination! We can fire him on the spot.” 

“But Mitch, he’s a top performer in every other way! He just doesn’t seem to like the tap system. Why can’t we take this as an opportunity to learn from it, improve the system?” 

“You know if you let this go, other people will smell your weakness. They’ll start trying to get away with things too,” insisted Cascade, though with just a little less heat.

“I think we can handle this in a way that allows us to improve,” insisted Stamper.

“We don’t need to improve!” said Cascade. “This guy does. I wouldn’t put up with it.” He looked at Keith, wanting to make sure Keith registered his strength.

“Mitch, I think I can handle it, but I’ll do it differently than you would.” 

“You’ll see Stamper, you can’t show weakness,” Cascade said, but she could tell he was giving ground. “We’ve got a good system, people just need to get in line and do it.” 

“We do have a good system, but it’s still new and we have to be open to improvement. I mean, this is a great time for us to ‘learn and be curious,’ right?” offered Stamper, backing her position with an LP.

“That’s right Stamper, see that Ken?,” he said, getting Keith’s name wrong. “Learn and Be Curious! Good. That’s good. But when it comes time for it, there better fucking be some Bias for Action too!”

And with that, Cascade slapped the folder closed, threw it on the table, and said, “But whatever you do, fix this!” 

He started for the door, then stopped and turned around. “And Ken?” he said. “Keep those reports coming to me. I want to see anything new you’re finding.”

“You bet,” said Keith. What else could he say?

Stamper looked over at him: he looked like a guy who’d just received a guilty verdict. “Don’t worry Keith,” she said, “We’ll figure this out.” Somehow.

< Next Chapter >

Stamper’s first challenge was to figure out what Christopher was up to! She had heard through the grapevine that Christopher had joined Amazon, but in a company that employed well over a million people, she didn’t figure she’d ever run into him. She wasn’t sure how she felt about reconnecting with Christopher.

They had parted on kind of weird terms: years ago, when they both worked at Wizards of WBT, Stamper had been really interested in him, despite him being quite a bit younger. They had gotten pretty tight there for a while, so tight that all their coworkers wondered if the “work hubby” jokes masked a more intense relationship. But then one day, Stamper had turned her attention to someone else—she couldn’t remember who—and Christopher wondered what the hell he had done. But he never said anything about it and nor did she, and they went their separate ways—with both of them wondering what might have been if things had gone differently. They hadn’t pined for each other, just wondered, in the way that you wonder about an old flame.  

And now here was Stamper, discovering that the first real “challenge” to her program came from a guy she really liked, a smart, affable guy who seemed to be impressing everyone he met at Amazon. This could be interesting.

She decided that the best way for her to “get to know” why Christopher was balking at taps was to redirect some of his Huddy human overrides to her for a bit. She had jumped into Huddy interactions from time to time, just to see how they worked, but it had always just been a way to test drive one of her program features. She had never before had a solid objective in mind. But this time she did: she wanted to figure out if Christopher was probing at a weakness in her Human Dynamics program that she hadn’t anticipated. 

She got her first chance pretty quickly, when Christopher got a tap for clicking on one of their regular simulated phishing attempts. Christopher clicked a link in an email and Huddy automatically locked his comms and popped up a chat message: “Christopher, that was a simulated phishing campaign, and you’ve violated a security protocol for the fourth time.” The system pinged Stamper at the same time, and she seamlessly hopped into the driver’s seat in place of the chatbot when Christopher replied.

“No shit, Huddy, it was obviously a simulated phishing campaign. Why can’t you guys create more convincing fakes? Do you think we’re idiots?”

Wow! Thought Stamper. She hadn’t expected belligerence.

“I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand what you mean,” was the response that the chatbot suggested, and Stamper pressed Send to use it, just to buy herself some time. But Christopher didn’t give her much time; he responded right away.

“C’mon Huddy, or whoever has taken over the controls. You know exactly what I mean: these simulated phishes are stupid. I clicked on it to tell you you’re wasting my time.”

The chatbot didn’t have a canned response for this one—it had flagged a human override after Christopher’s first antagonistic reply and it only gave the human one level of cover before they’d have to reply. Stamper wracked her brain to remember the rules for simulating chatbot interactions. When she replied, she didn’t want it to feel too human—they wanted to always maintain the plausibility that all the interactions came from a chatbot.

“We don’t think you’re stupid,” typed Stamper.

“Then either use simulated phishes that are more intelligent or leave me alone, FFS,” typed Christopher. 

Stamper, flustered, wrote: “I’m sorry, I don’t understand FFS.” She was trying to buy some time.

“Bullshit—I use FFS all the time, and you’ve understood it in the past. All you’re telling me is I’m no longer interacting with the chatbot.”

“We just want to help you avoid security incidents,” typed Stamper, now thoroughly on her heels.

“I’ve never had a real security incident in my life, and I want you to quit wasting my time,” Christopher shot back.

“We’ll note your concerns, Christopher,” typed Stamper.

“And is this tap going to count against me?” he prodded.

“We won’t count this tap against you,” typed Stamper, even as she canceled the tap report that the system had generated.

“Good—now turn my access back on so I can get to work!” Stamper could almost hear Christopher smashing the keys as he wrote this. She reinstated his access and closed the chat window.

Well hell, she thought to herself. This is not what I expected.

Stamper reached out to Keith shortly after this troubling exchange. 

“Have you done the Huddy overrides with Christopher?” she asked when they got together—but only after she had closed her office doors. She didn’t tell him about her exchange with Christopher.

“Yeah, I’ve done a couple,” Keith admitted. In fact, he’d been doing them almost exclusively for a couple weeks, ever since it had become obvious that Christopher was triggering the human override nearly every time. He seemed to know how to push the right “buttons” to get away from the chatbot.

“Why can’t I find the chat logs?” she asked. Each chat log—no matter where it took place, phone, Chime, Slack—was transcribed and attached to the employee’s Pulse report. She figured she could look at the logs to figure out if this was a pattern ... but all she could find were tap errors and empty chat logs associated with Christopher.

“Well, I declined to keep a few of the chat logs from our interactions,” said Keith. That was his way of saying he had deleted them, and they both knew it.

Stamper looked him square in the eyes: “Keith, why?”

“I guess I thought they could be misinterpreted or taken out of context,” he replied.

“I don’t understand,” she said, recognizing that he must have faced the same belligerence she had. “How?” 

“Well, Christopher can be pretty, uh, colorful, and I just thought that if someone was reading the transcript without a lot of context, they might get the wrong idea.”

“What kind of wrong idea?” Stamper pressed.

“Like they might misunderstand,” said Keith.

“Keith!! I need you to be more direct with me. You’re not in trouble. What’s in there that could be misread?”

Keith wanted this to go away. He wanted to pretend it never happened and he wanted to just carry on with his work, nice and simple and clean. He took a deep breath, looked out the window, fidgeted with the sleeve on his shirt. Did he have to answer this question? Why the hell did this Dourado guy have to cause so much trouble?

“Keith?” Stamper said gently, resting her hand on his forearm. Dan had told her that Keith could keep things bottled up pretty tight. She knew that coming on strong wasn’t likely to help matters; that’s partly why she wanted to keep Cascade from coming directly after Keith. Cascade was a battering ram. “You can trust me, I promise. We want the same thing.”

“What do we want?” said Keith, his voice catching. “Tell me what we want.”

“Keith, what I want us to create is a system that helps employees do their best work by eliminating unnecessary distractions and by optimizing the instruction and guidance we give them. That’s really all I’m after. Isn’t that what you want too?”

“Yeah, totally,” Keith sighed with relief, “—it’s great to hear you say it, that’s exactly what I want.”

“So Keith, what’s in the logs with Christopher that could be misread?”

There was only one path left for Keith and that was the truth, so he spilled it out: “Christopher gets so angry and mean. He just blows everything out of proportion! He thinks the taps are a nuisance and he accused me ... sorry, he accused Human Dynamics of trying to keep him in a cage, of keeping everybody in a cage.”

“Did he say that?”

“Pretty much. He said stuff like ‘I’m not your trained monkey’ and ‘Why don’t you get off my back?’ I just didn’t think that should float around in the chat logs. I think some people could misunderstand that.”

“So what did you do with these logs?” asked Stamper.

“I purged them. I just deleted the whole tap and all the follow-up. I thought maybe I could head this off at the pass, but ...”

“But?”

“But then I started to see tap rates increasing elsewhere on his team ... that’s when I started looking at that data I shared with you and that’s when I created that Daily Pulse question. I knew I needed more data.”

“Okay, well listen, is there anything else? Is there more I need to know about?”

“No, no, that’s about it. I’m not sure what else to do.”

“Well listen, you don’t have to deal with this alone. I’ll work on this with you. Maybe we just need to tweak some of our tap language, rewrite our correction scripts. I know Christopher, he’s a little prone to ... exaggeration. He likes to make things seem more dramatic than they really are.”

“No kidding! You’d think we were spying on him, the way he acts. We’re just doing our jobs, trying to help people do their jobs.” This is how Keith comforts himself: he tells himself that all is going according to plan. “But I can’t keep grabbing all of Christopher’s interactions—there are just too many. What are we going to do with these?”

“Keith, I know: I took one of Christopher’s interactions just the other day, ” she told him. “I know what you’re dealing with. We can work on these together. In fact, let’s set it up so that we both get pinged the moment the next interaction starts, maybe we can both be there.” 

“Yeah, that sounds great. I’ll set it up,” said Keith, relieved to have a plan. “And Stamper?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you!”

< Next Chapter >

If you’re new here, this one could be confusing … you’re jumping into the middle of an ongoing story. Start with the plot summary (links below) or go back a few chapters.

< Previous Chapter | First Chapter | Plot Summary | Next Chapter >

Stamper walked into her office the next day to find Cascade sitting in her chair. “So, what’d you learn?” asked Cascade as soon as Stamper opened the door. He had been waiting for her.

“Why are you in my office?” demanded Stamper, her tone more a reflex than a choice. Cascade was her boss, but what the hell? 

“I was just eager to talk to you,” beamed Cascade. With his big grin and bright eyes, it was hard to hold anything against him—even when he was sitting in your office at 7:30 in the morning waiting for you. “I know you like to get an early start.”

“I need to get a cup of coffee ...” she said, setting her bag down and turning on her heels.

“I’ll come with you,” said Cascade and he caught up to her as she walked down to the kitchen. Apparently she wasn’t going to get a chance to get her thoughts in order. 

“Okay Mitch,” she said after taking her time to punch her coffee order into the machine: Double Mocha, extra strong, extra hot. “That question was created to get some validation on data my team had been gathering.”

“What data? Why would you look for negative validation? It’s a dumb question.”

“One of the smartest analysts on my team believed that he was seeing some pushback on taps amongst a small product management team. He wanted to see if putting a negative response in the Daily Pulse would draw it out, get him some validation.”

“Did it?”

“No, actually ...”

“Of course not. ‘Cause there’s no problem. So why create one?” 

“What I was going to say is, that negative response got no reaction at all.” 

“That’s what I’m saying!” Cascade acted like he had won the argument. 

“But my analyst knows the data well enough to know that zero is itself a problem—there are always outliers.”

“Stupid questions get zero,” groused Cascade.

“If you heard him explain his reasoning, you’d see it’s not stupid.”

“Who is this fucking guy?” asked Cascade. “What, is he just looking to create problems? I should talk to him.”

As if putting Mitch Cascade on the case would solve everything, thought Stamper.

“Mitch, this is the last guy looking to create problems—he’s like the most careful, loyal guy on the team. And he’s brighter than hell. He’s been tracking this data for a while and he felt like he had to look for independent confirmation of what he was seeing.”

“I need to see this data. I need to talk to this guy.” 

“Listen, it’s going to be weird for him if you swoop in and start pressing him with all your questions. Can I just give you the data he’s collected and then, if you want to talk with him, we’ll set it up?”

“It sounds like you’re trying to protect him,” Cascade bore in. “Why are you trying to protect him?”

I am trying to protect him, thought Stamper. She pictured Keith under the glare of Cascade’s intense inquisition ... Keith’s cautious answers and refusal to speculate beyond his known data would be a red flag to Cascade, who would think he was hiding something and bear down even harder. Would Cascade fire him on the spot? That was the last thing she needed.

“I’m trying to protect you,” said Stamper. “I don’t want you scaring the hell out of my team before you understand the data. Let me get you all the reports and then we can all sit down and look at it together.” 

“Fine, fine, have them in my email ... by noon,” he barked.

“As soon as I can,” replied Stamper. 

“Go get ‘em Stamper,” he smiled at her. “It’s still Day One!” And he walked off.

Stamper caught Keith on Slack right away and asked him to send over all the data he could ASAP. He immediately called her.

“Hey, Stamper,” he said carefully, “you know you can access all my reports online right? They’re always open to you. Do you need me to show you which ones?”

“I know how to access them, thanks, but it’s not for me. It’s for ... upstream, so I just want that limited report set you showed me the other day.” She didn’t want him to know it was Cascade, yet.

“Oh shit, I knew this would cause trouble,” said Keith. “I’m sorry.” 

“Keith, you did the right thing ...  I only wish you’d brought me in earlier. But I’ve got your back on this.”

“Do you need me to come explain it? You don’t have to take the heat for me.” 

“Right now, I just want that limited report set, PDFs, a nice neat package. It will probably blow over, so just let me deal with it.” Keith had been expecting the request, and he had the reports to her within the hour.

As she forwarded the reports to Cascade—ensuring that Keith wasn’t identified—she wondered just what she was getting herself into.

< Previous Chapter | First Chapter | Plot Summary | Next Chapter >

Stamper got right to the point: “So, give me the full story.”

“So, first off,” said Keith, “that question was a mistake ...”

“Oh c’mon Keith, you’re not a mistake kind of guy,” said Stamper. Keith avoided mistakes like the plague and Stamper knew it. She liked that about him.

“Yeah, I know, it’s not that kind of mistake. I put that question in the Daily Pulse on purpose. It’s a data point that I think we should track.”

“What’s a data point we should track?” 

“Frustration with being tracked.” 

“Now wait a minute! I haven’t heard anyone say they were frustrated and I’ve certainly never heard anyone say we’re tracking people,” Stamper asserted with some heat. “We’re trying to create a system where the human experience is optimized, where people only get the direction and feedback they need to be their best.”              

“Yeah, and that’s why it’s so important that we gather comprehensive data.”

“We are gathering comprehensive data! Have you seen the reports I give to the S-team ... well, of course you have, you prepare most of the graphs and illustrations!”

“Yeah,” said Keith, “It’s a mad amount of data, but haven’t you noticed what’s missing?”

Keith couldn’t know that insinuating that Stamper had “missed something” was like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

“Oh, so I’m missing something? You know I invented this program, right? I think I’d fucking know if there was something missing. So why don’t you tell me Mr. Wizard!”

Stamper heated up fast. She didn’t like being questioned. And she couldn’t know that confrontation with authority was the last thing Keith wanted. He turned back sin hasty retreat. 

“Kate, I’m so sorry, I did not mean to insinuate anything at all. I and everybody else on the Human Dynamics team have the greatest respect for what you’ve created and I’m sure you understand things about it that I have no idea about. Will you please accept my apology?”

“Of course silly,” she smiled, deftly reversing the emotional tone of her previous comment. She cooled down quickly too. “I’m such a hothead!”

“Now,” she continued with a smile, “will you please tell me more about this mistake?” 

“Okay, thank you, and again, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean anything ... ,” Keith would have done anything to start over. “What I meant was it was a mistake to put that question out there without first thoroughly vetting it with you. I just didn’t want to bother you until I had more data.”

“But what kind of data are you looking for with a question like that?” said Stamper, Cascade’s words about not fishing for negativity ringing in her head. “You know that the S-team has made our work a top priority for the 3-year plan and we’re looking to showcase success.”

“I want to showcase success too,” said Keith. “But at the same time, I’m hearing little rumbles of resistance that I want to get a handle on ...”

“Rumbles? Resistance? What the hell are rumbles? I haven’t seen anything in the Pulse rollups or the tap data that speaks to resistance. C’mon Keith, you can do better than this.” 

“I know, I know, it’s vague and I don’t like that either! But I’ve looked back through all the Pulse questions we’ve asked, and we’ve never offered a single option for people to ... uh ... question the program. We’ve never asked any questions that would reveal anything but shades of positive acceptance. But there’s something there, I swear it—in little anonymous comments that come in, in the way people talk about taps in meetings, like little jokes and stuff, and very rarely in the free-form answer fields attached to Daily Pulses.”

“Those are anecdotes, Keith, anecdotes! You know we can’t pay attention to that. Whenever there’s something new, somebody is going to grumble about it.”

“I know, and I agree—and that’s why I wrote that question. I wanted to see what people would say to a question like that.”

“And?”

“Not a single person selected that answer. Zero!”

“See! That’s good! It’s because people really like it.”

Keith swallowed hard. How could he tell her what he suspected? How could he say that the fact that NOBODY had selected that answer was itself a statistical anomaly? Well, he had opened this door, mistake or not, he had better step through it.

He didn’t want to push back on Stamper. He wanted to just go along, to keep working with this data, drawing connections, preparing these amazing graphics that he had been building recently, ones that showed how accurately they were able to predict behavioral trends, that by tapping people in advance of their behavior they could curtail that behavior, and that this contributed to overall productivity.... This was such a good story to tell, and it was some of the most satisfying work he had ever done.

But he couldn’t ignore what he was seeing. He couldn’t pretend that the discontinuities in the data correlations he was starting to see didn’t mean something, and he couldn’t only look for correlations under the streetlight. He had to know if the clues he was seeing in the shadows meant anything. He had to know if the ice cream was melting because the freezer was broken.

And with that, Keith started to spell out for her, in as much detail as he could remember, all the various little signals he had been getting about the dark side of the Human Dynamics program: the conversations he had overheard, the cryptic Pulse replies, the care with which people spoke when they learned that he worked with Human Dynamics. This is what the reports had been missing—any evidence that all these taps had unintended consequences, that they might in fact be creating behaviors that were, well, not very Amazonian. 

So Keith took a deep breath and started in: 

“I’m fine with ignoring a few little complaints here and there,” Keith said, “really I am. And I don’t want to over-index on anecdotes. But given what I’ve been seeing and hearing, my question should have pulled a couple responses. Heck, somebody should have simply clicked it by accident! But zero—zero! That’s just improbable.”

“Maybe it’s because people really don’t feel that way!” said Stamper.

“Let me tell you why that can’t be the case,” said Keith. “There’s this one team where we’ve started to see above average tap rates, and I’ve been keeping my eye on it. It started with this one guy on the team, fairly new to Amazon—in fact, he started here the very week we put the taps into effect.” 

“This guy has had above average tap rates from the beginning, but on all his other metrics he scores really high. His productivity score is super high, his manager ratings are good, his teammate ratings are off the charts, all that. So, he’s an interesting anomaly.”

Stamper simply nodded.

“So I start to look into this guy, right, like I pull all his data and all his interactions with Huddy”—these were the logs of any chats that came about as a result of taps—”and he shows just this really bizarre pattern. It’s like he prompts a tap, then pushes at it a little harder, seeing if he can get more taps or prompt an interaction with Huddy. And he pushes back—like he argues with Huddy.”

“So he’s got backbone, that’s good, right?” says Stamper. 

“Is it? Or is he supposed to disagree and commit?” 

“There’s a balance,” replies Stamper. “Is he becoming a problem?”

“I don’t know!,” said Keith. “Honestly, I’ve jumped onto some of his Huddy interactions myself. I asked to direct some of his human overrides to me, just so I could see what the deal is.” They had built in the capacity to override the AI chatbot they called Huddy, inserting a human into the conversation if it got too complicated for the chatbot (which was pretty rare) or, more often, if some on the Human Dynamics team wanted to get a better sense of the interplay between employees and Huddy. 

“You didn’t interact with your own voice did you?” asked Stamper.

“No, of course not, I used the Huddy voice masking,” said Keith; this was the default, but it was possible but highly discouraged to use your own voice; they didn’t really want people to associate the directions with any individual. “But here’s the deal: he didn’t seem belligerent or angry, just skeptical. It’s like he was probing to see what he could get away with.”

“Well listen, we’re not hiring sheep—we should expect questioning, right? After all, our goal is to hire and develop the best,” she said, citing another LP. “Keith, honestly, I’m not sure I’m seeing the issue.”

“Well, here’s the deal: the longer he’s been here, the more the tap rates of his teammates start to increase. I’m seeing a correlation between time with this guy and tap rates. Weird, right? So I’m asking myself, what’s going on? We don’t have any data that tells us that he’s encouraging resistant behavior—like the chat logs don’t show any anti-HD tendencies—but his mere presence seems to be increasing the tap rate on his team. Look, here’s my data,” says Keith, and he pulls up a graph on his phone to show Stamper the trendline data that shows that the tap rate on this guy’s team is 12% higher than average. He then points to some individual Pulse data that shows that people who had low tap rates before coming to work on this team suddenly start to exhibit distinctly higher tap rates once they interact with this guy. And yet, the whole team shows good overall performance. Keith had prepped all this in advance of the conversation.

“Keith, honestly, I can’t make sense of this data looking at your phone! Can you net it out for me?” says Stamper. 

“I don’t want to be alarmist, but I think I’m seeing a cell of  … uh, god, I don’t know what to call it,” said Keith.

“Try,” urged Stamper.

“Look, I don’t want to be dramatic,” Keith sighed, and then he just committed: ”But hell, let’s call it ‘resistance’ or just maybe ‘reluctance’ toward our work, and it’s centered in a top-performing team. That’s what led me to insert that question into the Daily Pulse. And yet that question gets no response, nothing, not even from this team that I think is showing reluctance. That’s why getting zero responses to that question bugs me. I wonder if they’re mocking us?” 

“Well fuck me,” said Kate, using one of her favorite phrases. “Why would anybody reject what we’re doing in Human Dynamics? We’re just trying to make it easier for people to get their work done.” 

“I don’t think you should ask me,” says Keith. “I think you should ask the guy who seems to be single-handedly raising the tap rate of everyone he comes in contact with.”

“Fine,” says Stamper, “I was hoping to avoid this but I guess I can’t. Who is it?”

“I was hoping to avoid it too,” said Keith. “I think you know him. His name is Christopher Dourado.”

Stamper didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

< Previous Chapter | First Chapter | Plot Summary | Next Chapter >

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I’ve made up the story and the characters in it. While certain businesses, places, and events are used to orient the reader in the real world, the characters and actions described are wholly imaginary and any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.

“What the hell are these questions employees are getting?” barked Cascade as he walked into Stamper’s office. He had stopped knocking a while ago—but the smile never stopped.

“I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you mean,” said Stamper, pulling her head out of the work he had interrupted. 

“This Daily Pulse question that went out today, about how employees feel about predictive taps,” said Cascade, slapping a printout down in front of her. Every manager got a daily report on how their employees had answered the Daily Pulse questions. The results were anonymous—but at L8 and above, you could find out how individuals answered. “Why are we offering them negative options?”

“Hold on, let me read it,” said Stamper. It read like this:

When I get a tap to improve my future behavior I (select all that apply):

• Appreciate learning how I can improve

• Think about how I can correct my behavior so I don’t get another tap

• Wonder what I did to get this tap

• Worry that I am not meeting standards

• Feel frustrated that I am being watched

She immediately saw what he was angry about—the last option. 

“I didn’t see this one,” she admitted.

“Didn’t you view your Pulse Report?” he demanded.

“Not yet—I’ve been busy.” 

“You’ve got to make time for these.”

“Yeah, I get it. My bad,” said Stamper.

“What about that last option,” he pressed on. “Why the hell is that in there?”

“I don’t know ...”

“Then find out!” 

“I will.”

But Cascade wasn’t ready to let up.

“You see the problem, don’t you Stamper?” he bore in. “If you put this kind of negative thought in peoples’ heads, this is how they’ll start to see it. We should only give them positive options. I don’t mind them worrying that they’re not meeting standards or wondering if they should be doing better. That’s good. But why the hell would we acknowledge they might feel frustrated at being watched?”

“Mitch,” she pleaded. “I don’t know, I just saw it. Let me look into it, I’m sure somebody just got in a hurry.”

“Or someone is trying to sabotage the program,” he inserted. “We can’t have that Stamper. If people aren’t on board, they shouldn’t be here.”

“Mitch, please, let’s not jump to conclusions. This is a good team, they believe in what we’re doing. I’m sure it’s just a mistake ...”

“We don’t make mistakes Stamper. We’re right, a lot, remember?” 

“I know, I know. Let me dig in on it. I’ll dive deep, okay?” She had parried his use of a Leadership Principle with an LP of her own. 

“That’s right Stamper, dive deep, that’s good. I can’t have anyone encouraging resistance or undermining our decisions.” He had a way of saying stuff like this with his big grin that made it seem almost normal to want to exert that much control.

Listening to Cascade, Stamper couldn’t help but flash back to the time she and Cascade were driving together to an offsite and a text message had popped up on his screen: “David just exceeded the speed limit,” it read.

“Oh shit, damn that kid,” said Mitch. “Stamper, hold the wheel for a second.” Before she could even reach over he pulled his phone from its holder on the dash and dialed.

“David,” he said to his son, “I saw you were speeding again.” He grinned over at Stamper. She wondered if he was embarrassed at her seeing that he was spying on his son, or if he got a kick out of letting her in on it.

“Dad,” she could hear the young boy’s voice say, “I just pulled into the neighborhood and you know that speed limit changes so fast.”

“You should know it’s there then and slow up ahead of time,” pressed Mitch. “One more time in this cycle and you’ll lose your driving privileges.”

“Fine, fine, Dad, I hate this app!” 

“It just helps you be a safer driver, son. It helps you make good choices. You want to make good choices don’t you?” 

David didn’t respond. 

“David, you want to make good choices, right?” 

“Of course Dad.”

“Good boy, I love you David. Gotta go,” Mitch said as he hung up.

He re-cradled his phone and took the wheel, then grinned over at Stamper: “This is a great app, let’s me track the kids, make sure they’re driving safely. Really helps me be a better parent.”

Stamper didn’t hear a single note of irony in his voice.

Carefully, she replied: “I would have struggled with that when I was a teenager.”

“Oh yeah, me too,” laughed Mitch. “But teens today, they have a higher standard than us. It’s great.” 

Stamper must have looked lost in thought, because Cascade snapped his fingers. 

“Hey, Stamper, are you going to answer my question?” he said. “When are you going to get back to me on that?”

“Oh, sorry,” she stammered. “as soon as I have an answer.”

“By noon?” he asked.

“Mitch, as soon as I can! I promise.” 

“Good Stamper, that’s good,” he said. “Keep up the good work. It’s Day One you know?” He grinned at her, turned on the high beams. Then he walked out the door.

Keith was poring over the latest data when his Slack icon bounced on his screen. Keith kept all sounds turned off because he didn’t like the interruptions, but he had set up Slack to bounce when certain people messaged him. People like Stamper. So he clicked over to it.

“Hey Keith,” she wrote, “do you have a minute to come over?”

“I’ve got a meeting in 20 minutes,” he replied, “can it wait until after the meeting?” Amazonians were encouraged to guard their time, so Keith felt alright asking. And in the last weeks, he and Stamper had worked together more and more. They were developing a pretty decent working relationship. She liked how data-focused he was. She had told Cascade about him: that she had a guy who was brilliant at unpacking data correlations.

“Now would be better,” she shot back. “It will just take a second.” 

“BRT,” he replied. And he hustled over to her office.

“Hey, Stamper,” he smiled as he knocked on her door and waited outside. “Is now still a good time?”

“Of course,” she said, “come in. I was just looking over the daily Pulse Report and I was a little concerned that we might be leading the witness with one question. Do you know which one I’m talking about?”

Keith nodded; of course he knew which one it was. He was in charge of writing their Pulse questions. “I think I do.”

“It feels a little out of keeping with our general approach. What’s the story?”

Keith sighed. He knew this was coming; he just didn’t know it would come so quickly. “Do you want the short answer or the long one?”

Stamper sensed Keith’s unease and she decided to use a light touch. “Which do you want to give me Keith?”

“I think you deserve the long one, but I’ve only got a few minutes. Can I just tell you that I need more data?”

“That’s a start,” laughed Stamper, “but you’re right—I want the full story. What’s your end of the day look like?” And they quickly agreed to get together at 5:00 for a walk. Cascade would just have to get her update tomorrow. 

In their own ways, both Stamper and Keith prepared for their afternoon conversation.

Stamper, using the special access allowed to her as an L8, pulled a personal Pulse Profile on Keith ... and she was reassured that her judgments on him were spot on: he was getting the minimum amount of training, which meant that none of his behaviors threw up flags calling for more, and the only taps he was getting were the all-hands taps. Moreover none of his answers to the Daily Pulse questions threw up a single red flag, indicating that he might be unhappy or dissatisfied in his work. And his performance ratings were top notch. There wasn’t a single indicator that he was anything less than an ideal Amazonian.

Keith’s prep was of a different sort: he had to decide exactly how much of his growing concern with their program he was willing to share with Stamper. He had already committed to the “long answer” to her question, so it’s not like he could just explain it away as a careless mistake, but how much of his concern did he let her see? There was a part of him that just wanted to cop to a stupid mistake and promise it wouldn’t happen again. He didn’t like to rock the boat, and Stamper was so devoted to this program. 

BUT ... he’d  been picking up the warning signs for a while now. For weeks or maybe months. When they first expanded the taps, he’d see the chat logs or the after-tap feedback forms, and he could tell that some folks really didn’t like how closely they were being observed or didn’t like being told that they needed “training.” So he’d quietly ask people if they wanted to tell him more about their responses. After all, if there were ways they could improve the program, they wanted to hear it—he wanted the data, so he could develop the best analyses. But people didn’t react well to his follow-up. They didn’t want to complain ... well, they didn’t want to be flagged as complaining.

When Keith popped in to see one guy to ask if he could follow-up on a comment, the guy acted surprised that anyone knew the comment was associated with him. “Wait, I thought those were anonymous!” he said. 

“Not entirely,” Keith had replied, “there’s special access provided to some of the team so we can try to mitigate concerns.”

“Well,  honestly, I think I was just having a bad day,” the guy said. “I don’t have any problem with it now.” 

“Are you sure?” pressed Keith, “It’s okay if you do. We’d love the feedback.” 

“No, it’s cool, I’m good,” he said. “Can we remove my comment? It’s not in my Pulse file is it?“

“Well, I can’t comment on the contents of Pulse files,” replied Keith, repeating the standard line they were required to stick with. “But you can file a request for a Pulse file correction if you’re sure it was a mistake.”

“And draw more attention to it? No thanks! For the record, I have NO PROBLEM with the Human Dynamics program. Can you tell me if it’s in there?” 

“Yeah, I can’t really do that,” replied Keith. And then, in a rare deviation from protocol, he added, “But listen, one small comment won’t really cause a big problem if it’s not repeated. I mean, we understand that people have bad days!” He smiled.

“Okay, cool,” he replied. “Anything else? I mean, I really like most of the ... I don’t know ... direction and information I’ve been getting. It’s very helpful. Truly.”

“Thanks, you’ve been really helpful,” said Keith.

But as he walked out his office door, he heard the guy mutter: “God forbid I cast doubt on the holy Human Dynamics program.” Keith paused. Should he go back? No ... but his antennae were up. He knew Stamper and her boss, Mitch Cascade, were pretty happy with the way the Human Dynamics program was going, and all the data backed that up: people were spending more time on work and they could see marked reductions in the behaviors they were trying to modify. Yet Keith sensed they needed to start paying more attention to the way people felt about the program. But how could he do that if he couldn’t collect data about it? That was the question that sat in the back of his mind when he wrote that foolish question for the Daily Pulse that Stamper wanted to ask him about. But how much of that should he tell Stamper?

That was the fence he was sitting on when 5:00 rolled around and Stamper walked across the courtyard to meet him.

< Previous Chapter | First Chapter | Plot Summary | Next Chapter >

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I’ve made up the story and the characters in it. While certain businesses, places, and events are used to orient the reader in the real world, the characters and actions described are wholly imaginary and any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.

“Good morning and welcome to Day One at Amazon!” said the enthusiastic host of the group onboarding call. “I know you’ve heard that it’s always Day One at Amazon, and that’s true, but for you, today really is day one.” 

Christopher would have typically rolled his eyes—he didn’t like this kind of happy talk—but it WAS day one, and he was on a Zoom call with what looked like 60 other new hires from across various other divisions within Amazon, so he just smiled and gave a thumbs up. The hiring process that brought him to his new job as a product manager at Amazon—technically, at AWS, the cloud services side of Amazon—had dragged on for weeks, and he was eager to get going.  

He had asked his hiring manager if he could take some of the required training in advance of his start day, the better to get a head start on really doing the work, but he was repeatedly cautioned to be patient. “We’re excited to have you coming on board Christopher, but it will take several weeks to get through training and learn enough about the tools to really start to make a contribution.” Christopher had spent the last seven years at a small company called Wizards of WBT, and he was burning to work somewhere that moved faster and built cool stuff. But he supposed that he could live through a couple weeks of required onboarding before he got to the real work.

He was pleasantly surprised, then, when his chipper onboarding host announced that they were a very special group of new Amazonians.  “As you know, we’re always innovating here at Amazon—innovation is built right into our leadership principles. And that’s why we’re reinventing our onboarding process, starting today. That’s right, starting today all new employees are taking part in a new onboarding methodology that’s been carefully created by our Human Dynamics team. To explain what it’s all about, I’d like to introduce you to the head of the Human Dynamics team: Mitch Cascade. Mitch, it’s all yours.”

“Hello Amazonians,” Mitch beamed into the camera, his bright, straight teeth notable even in the muted environment of a Zoom call. “I am so thrilled to be here to greet you, because my team has been building up to this day for months. You are about to experience a new way of getting started at Amazon, a way of starting that is totally aligned with our leadership principles. The cool thing is,” he gushed, “it’s also aligned with what we know about you: that you’re smart, you want to succeed, and you’re impatient to get going. Well, get ready, because you’re about to experience the future!”

Christopher had watched a bunch of videos of Jeff Bezos and other Amazon execs talking about their vision for the company, and Mitch Cascade fit right in: he had a gleam of messianic intensity in his eyes, and he spoke with the conviction of a true believer. Guys like this triggered Christopher’s inherent skepticism … he called it his built-in bullshit detector. But he knew that it took leaders like this to build a company of Amazon’s size and, hell, greatness, and that was part of why he was here. He wanted to be part of that. So he had to swallow a little messianic bullshit along the way? What could it hurt?

“We’re not going to ask you to take hours and hours of compliance training,” boasted Cascade. “What do you all think of that?” Christopher’s cohort of newbies stuck their thumbs up in front of the camera or punched their “thumbs up” emoji. “I know if we were all in a room together there’d be a great cheer,” continued Cascade, “because most training is stuff you know already, right? You know about cybersecurity and not taking bribes and being inclusive … I mean, we hired you because you’re the best and the brightest! Why would we force you to relearn things you already know?” Cascade was thrilled by this stuff.

Cascade explained that the Human Dynamics team had identified all of the core knowledge and skills people needed to succeed at Amazon, and were continually working to identify ways to see those knowledge and skills demonstrated in daily work. “All you have to do is go about your work, using the great tools we’ve provided, and the Human Dynamics team would take care of the rest,” said Cascade. “We’ll reward you when we see you doing the right thing, especially when you’re living up to the leadership principles. And yes, we’ll remind you if and when you go off track.” 

Cascade got serious for a moment: “We don’t expect you to be perfect. We know that sometimes you’ll click on a link that you shouldn’t click, or you’ll delay making a decision that you have the authority to make. But we’re not going to punish you when you’re not perfect. No, we’re just going to give you a slight nudge back in the right direction. We call these ‘taps,’ like a tap on the shoulder from a friend. We’ll tap you if we notice that you’re doing something wrong … well, not wrong so much as not Amazonian,” he beamed into the camera. “And eventually, you’ll find yourself just perfectly aligned with your coworkers, your manager, and the whole company.”

“I’m going to leave you now with these words: it’s Day One at Amazon, and you are going to be part of inventing the future! Let’s focus on the customer, deliver results, and think big! I can’t wait to see what you’ll create!”

And with that his screen disappeared and the Human Dynamics team came back on to tell us what to expect and how to get started.

Christopher got his first tap on his second day. He’d successfully started up and tried some of the tools that Amazon had invented to make their work seamless, including Chime, the Zoom “replacement” that his manager used to host his team’s daily stand-up. Day two and he was already in a stand-up, he thought! This was awesome.

Now he was in CommsCentral, or CeeCee, as they called it, which was Amazon’s answer to an integrated e-mail, calendar, and instant messaging solution. “You’re gonna love it,” his manager Alan had told him, “it’s so helpful at keeping you on track. Sometimes it feels like CeeCee is reading your mind, but you’ll never be late for a meeting.” 

Christopher liked CeeCee well enough: it was fast and the interface was clean and basic, pretty much the standard Amazon design aesthetic. Even on his second day, there were 15 new messages to attend to, but it was one from the Seattle Public Schools that caught his eye. “Parent Information Bulletin,” said the header. His oldest had just started kindergarten, and he figured maybe this was something he needed to look into. Sure enough: “Click here for an important announcement from your principal.” And so he did. Christopher clicked.

“Oops,” said the pop-up window that centered itself on Christopher's screen. “That seemed like an email that you should pay attention to, but it was just a test. Remember: Amazon asks that all employees activate ‘personal mode’ when looking into non-work issues on work time. All you have to do is press the ‘Me Time’ button from any screen and you’ll enter a space where you can handle any personal issues.”

“Shit, that’s right,” muttered Christopher. He had learned about that first thing this morning. Didn’t seem so hard—he had just forgotten. But then his screen flashed again.

“Do you have any questions about ‘Me Time’ Christopher?” asked someone named Huddy in the chat window.

“No, just forgot,” he typed. 

“No problem Christopher—after all it’s just your second day. My name is Huddy—I’m your friend from the Human Dynamics team and I’ll tap you like this if you need a reminder on something,” replied Huddy.

“Oh, you’re a real person?” typed Christopher, who was a little perplexed.

“No, I’m a chat bot, but I’ll switch you over to a human Huddy if it seems like you need it,” the bot replied instantly.

“Ah, I got it. I guess this was my first tap,” wrote Christopher, adding a smiley emoticon at the end.

“That’s right! I bet you won’t get many more,” typed Huddy, adding a winking face emoji. “Bye for now.” The screen closed and Christoper was back into his email—and the one from the “school” had disappeared.

The next day Christopher saw an email with the subject line “Urgent: Password Reset Required” come into his email and reflexively he double-clicked to open it—and no sooner had he done so then his screen froze and Huddy appeared:

“It’s me again Christopher; it looks like you forgot about our no password policy.”

“I didn’t forget, I just figured maybe I had done something wrong,” Christopher replied.

“We wouldn’t have let you continue if you’d done something wrong,” said Huddy. “Our IT systems protect you from error so you can focus on the customer.”

Christopher didn’t know what to say in return, so he tried to close the window and get back to work … but it wouldn’t close. 

“Would you like me to provide you with a short video about our login policies, Christopher? Or do you think you’ll remember what we told you when you set up your authentication?” 

“I’m good, I’ll remember,” replied Christopher.

“Great, take care!,” replied Huddy, and Christopher got back to work. Over the course of the day he spotted and promptly deleted two simulated phishing emails—this was something he was pretty good at, and a little smiley face popped up on his notification bar saying “Good job.” But clearly he’d have to pay closer attention to the little nuances of life at Amazon. At least he didn’t have to sit through a ton of training!

Christopher learned more about what it meant to be Amazonian over the next several weeks, and not just from taps. It appeared that there were “controls” in place that would actively keep him from doing things that he shouldn’t, but they didn’t all generate a tap—the little visit from Huddy he had gotten the first couple days. 

On the first day he sent some information about a new product offering over to a vendor they were working with. There was a slight pause when he clicked send and a message popped up on his screen: “I see you’re sending some information outside of Amazon—would you like to review our data sharing practices first?” There was a Yes button and a No Thanks button. Christopher thought he knew about data sharing—but he pressed Yes anyway, and what he read confirmed that he was on safe ground. So he clicked the button to send the email and held his breath. No problem; he went on his way. 

The vendor soon wrote back, asking for more data on product adoption rates, so Christopher prepped the email and pressed Send. Again, the pop-up asking him if we wanted to review Amazon’s data sharing practices.

Christopher paused. Would he have to do this every time he sent an email? Or was this just something they did for new people? Should he click Yes again, just to be sure? Or should he trust himself and click No Thanks? Dammit! He wasn’t sure.

Huddy popped up on his screen.

“It seems like you’re not sure what to do Christopher,” they said. (The fun joke was that Huddy used they/them pronouns.)

“I should probably click Yes, just to be safe,” said Christopher. “But I think I know this stuff.” 

“Trust yourself Christopher. Remember, Amazonians are right, a lot,” they said, quoting what Christopher considered to be the most vexing of the leadership principles.

“It’s hard to feel right a lot when you get fucking pop-ups the moment you take a second to think,” muttered Christopher, and then instantly regretted it.

“Remember, I respond to voice or text inputs Christopher. And it’s okay to feel frustrated. We know there’s a lot to learn.”

“I’m sorry,” Christopher said—hardly believing that he was apologizing to a chatbot.

“It’s okay, I understand. And I bet the next time you get this prompt, you will click No Thanks. It seems like you understand data sharing policies pretty well.”

“Ha ha, thanks,” voiced Christopher. He clicked No Thanks, sent the email, and went on about his day. He must have gotten it right. Either that or Huddy was worried that they were pushing him too far.

In the meantime, Huddy recorded the interaction in Christopher’s Pulse file, a record of all of Christopher’s interactions with Human Dynamics.

“So, in conclusion,” chirped Diana after she had presented her 2-pager to the entire team, “I think you’ll all agree this idea is so solid that even if you don’t personally love it, you’ll have backbone and disagree and commit.”

“That’s Amazonian for ‘I don’t care if you don’t like it, do it anyway,’” muttered Christopher—but not before he made damn sure that he was muted on the Chime call. “Why can’t we all agree that ‘Deliver Results’ means we don’t accept self-promotional bullshit?” Christopher really hated Diana’s idea. 

Christopher’s Apple Watch flashed to life and the voice of Huddy said, “That’s not nice.” 

“What the ...” said Christopher out loud. He checked his computer again: not only was he muted, but he so completely expected that he wouldn’t say anything on this call that he had disabled his sound card, just to be sure he wouldn’t be overheard. He’d never gotten a tap on his watch before.

Huddy piped up again: “You know, Christopher, disagree and commit is one of our most important principles. It doesn’t work if you say you agree but act like you don’t.”

“But I can’t say I don’t agree—I’ll get shouted down!” countered Christopher, by now all too used to having conversations with the voices inside the machine.

“You can make your voice heard in respectful ways, but if leadership chooses a direction after that, you have to disagree and commit.”

“I’ll never take any public action that shows I’m not on board, I swear,” said Christopher.

“Remember, it’s not just your words, Christopher, it’s also your facial expressions and your subtle indications of checking out, like turning off your sound card. We need your commitment to be real.”

“You need me to be an Amazonian heart and soul,” said Christopher, very carefully shaping his words to convey conviction, not skepticism or the questioning that he couldn’t seem to chase from his mind, no matter how hard he tried. Did it work? There was a long pause and the swirling A on his phone glimmered, showing that the watch was processing.

“Sorry, could you say that again?” replied Huddy. 

“I said, you want me to be an Amazonian heart and soul,” he repeated, even more plausibly this time.

“That’s what we hope Christopher. But what do you want?”

“I want to be an Amazonian heart and soul!” he replied.

“Great!,” replied Huddy. “Now, could you please restore your audio settings so you can join your next meeting?”

“Sure, sorry,” said Christopher. “I’ll be right there.”

A few days later, Christopher was working away.

“Oh shit, what now?” sighed Christopher as the now-familiar HD icon pulsed on his screen. He knew he’d have 15 seconds to click the icon before it would pop up and lock him out of his other work. But he wasn’t quite sure what he had done. Could it really have been that last email he had sent?

“Way to respond to that tap Christopher! That shows a bias for action,” said Huddy in the chat box that had popped up.

“Thx,” typed Christopher.

“Bias for action is important Christopher. It helps us bring value to our customers and that earns trust.” Standard HD bot talk, thought Christopher: it was never just one leadership principle they were hectoring me about, but some combination of them. So which was it this time?

Christopher: “Agreed.”

Huddy: “In that last email, you missed a chance to show bias for action. You asked for Bob’s ‘buy-in’ even though he clearly told you yesterday in your 4:00 that he was fine.”

Christopher: “I don’t think that’s what he said.”

Huddy: “I disagree Christopher. Would you like me to replay it for you?” 

Christopher: “No.”

Huddy: “I’m glad. Remember, your fellow Amazonians will tell you if they disagree. You have to trust that you are right, a lot, and then show a bias for action.” There it was, “Are Right, A Lot,” the LP he found so vexing. He felt like he was right a lot, but everytime he turned around there was Huddy, telling him he wasn’t. But there was no use arguing about it. 

Christopher: “Thanks Huddy.” 

The bot replied: “You’re welcome Christopher—now let's get back to Day One! :)”

Christopher hit the thumbs up emoji and closed the window. He always wondered if sometimes they put a real person on the other end of these conversations, but he doubted it. “Ah well,” he muttered. “Back to work.”

But he couldn’t help but wonder, was it like this for everyone? Did all of his co-workers get near daily visits from Huddy, with a reminder that this comment or that email or this weekly report didn’t meet expectations? 

It’s not like he was failing at this job. In fact, his manager told him just the other day that he was “kicking ass.” His main driver was product releases, and he’d been leading his team on both new features and feature updates. But he was starting to feel like Huddy was getting in his head, second-guessing him every time he turned around. It was starting to piss him off.

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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I’ve made up the story and the characters in it. While certain businesses, places, and events are used to orient the reader in the real world, the characters and actions described are wholly imaginary and any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.

Keith was pretty pumped. Only 60 days into his job and he was the lead presenter on this month’s Data Deep Dive, which was still a fairly new component of the Human Dynamics team’s regular reporting schedule. He’d been to the last one, 30 days ago, but he had just sat in the virtual meeting with his camera off, since his manager just asked him to observe. Today, he was in the room at Building 11, and the whole Seattle team was there.

It was an exciting day for their team, and Keith was on point to show off the correlations he had been working on between the cyber stuff (which had all started before he got there) and the DEI stuff that he had been so immersed in. It turns out that there were some pretty powerful correlations between impulse control around things like phishing and data sharing and the tendency to “misalign” with Amazon’s DEI goals. Apparently the division’s Head of Strategy, Kate Stamper, had caught wind of what he had been reporting to his manager and wanted to be there when it was reported out.

It’s not that Keith was nervous, really. After all, his job today was purely to identify the intriguing cross-behavioral affinities between actions related to their cyber and DEI behavioral triggers. This stuff was pretty solid and he knew he could present it well. 

He knew his data was impeccable: after all, they had thousands and thousands of incidents (that’s what they called the behaviors that violated protocol), taps, and re-taps; a ton of tap validations, or TVs, which was where the behavior was corrected after the first tap; a smaller pool of TEs (tap escalations, where second and third taps were required to get to long-term tap validation); and, thankfully, a really small set of FTVs, or failure to validate, which meant that repeated taps—they’d gone to T4 on a couple people—still weren’t bringing about corrected behavior.

It’s what lay “beneath” the data that lingered in Keith’s mind, causing him a shadow of doubt. He had dug down into the commentary, and he was seeing something that troubled him. He’d heard that Stamper was pretty smart. Would she be able to sniff out some of the troubling undercurrents that lay beneath these intriguing data correlations? He guessed that today he would find out.

Kate Stamper occupied the room unlike any executive he had ever seen. Most of them walked in at the last minute, usually alone or paired up with another high-level person who got all their attention. They acted like they were super busy, and expected the whole room to quiet down the moment they signaled they were ready to go—even if that was five minutes late and everybody had been waiting.

But Stamper was different. She’d gotten there early—though not as early as Keith, who wanted to make sure he was ready to present. She entered quietly and immediately sat down next to one of his colleagues and introduced herself. As others started filling the room, she went around, introduced herself (as if she needed an introduction), asked people their names, how long they had been there, just regular stuff. She seemed to be seeking a connection with as many people as possible, and her affable demeanor set everybody at ease. But she was watching the clock, too, and just before the top of the hour she sat down next to Keith at the table in front.

“Hi, I’m Kate Stamper,” she said, offering Keith a vigorous handshake. “Most people call me Stamper.” 

“Hi, uh, Stamper,” said Keith. “I’m Keith, Keith Conn.”

“I know who you are, silly,” she grinned at Keith. “Your brother has told me all about you. I’m so glad we finally get to meet.”

“Oh, that’s funny, I didn’t know Dan had mentioned me to you,” said Keith. He was generally kind of formal with his “superiors,” but Stamper was making that hard. She had eye contact that just wouldn’t quit and a kind of vibrating energy that Dan had told him about ... but there was no way to understand it until you were in her presence. I guess this is what they called charisma.

“Are you kidding me?” said Stamper. “He says you got all the number smarts in the family, but that he’s better looking. I’m not sure I believe that.” She smiled and looked him right in the eye. 

Holy cow, Keith thought, is she flirting with me? But then she pivoted to her other side and turned that same charm on the other presenter and he realized that this was just Stamper. No wonder everybody liked her so much: she just lavished her undivided attention on whoever she was speaking to.

And then, at one minute past the hour, Stamper started the meeting:

“Hi gang,” she started out. “Gosh, I’m just so happy to see all of you here. I’ve heard that these Data Deep Dives are where the action is in Human Dynamics, so I’m so tickled to be here. I’ve met a bunch of you already, but for those who I haven’t met, I’m Kate Stamper and I’m the head of strategy here at Human Dynamics. Now, if you think ‘head of strategy’ means you can’t talk to me, you’re wrong! I really want to get to know all of you, so please, if you ever see me around, just come up and say hi. I’m just like you—I’m psyched to be here at the world’s greatest company and, I know you’ve heard it a million times, but it feels like Day One to me every day.”

Stamper had this way of saying the standard “Amazon exec” things that made them feel personal and real. No wonder Human Dynamics was getting such a great reputation as a cool team to be on, thought Keith. 

“For me it’s Day One because every day I get to work on something I’m really passionate about, which is helping employees improve their performance and keeping them from wasting their time. I joined because I wanted to end training as we know it—you’ve probably heard that already, right?—but once I got here and saw what we could do, it just really opened my mind. I wanted to help us all be the best Amazonians and the best people we can be. I’m so happy that so many of you share that goal with me, and even though he hasn’t said so directly, I bet our first presenter shares that goal as well. And with that, let me introduce you to Keith Conn.”

And that was it, bam, she turned toward Keith. It had happened so quickly he was almost taken by surprise ... but Keith was the master of preparation. He was ready to go.

“Thanks Kate ...”

“”Stamper!!,” Stamper insisted. “Really, I like my nickname!” 

“Okay, thanks Stamper,” Keith smiled. “I’m happy to get the chance to talk to you all today” — Keith was reading off his slide notes — “and to follow up on the data that Matt shared last month. As you all know, I’ve only been here a couple months ...”

“We’ve all only been here a couple months,” laughed Stamper.

“Right, you’re right,” Keith agreed. It was uncomfortable for him to be interrupted, but he pressed on. “Anyway, I’m ready to share with you some of my findings related to the correlation between the cyber behavior response matrix and our new DEI response matrix.”

And in his careful, overly corporate way, Keith shared his data with his team: he laid out the correlations between sub-optimal behaviors in cyber and sub-optimal behaviors in DEI. Both cyber and DEI had a list of desired behavioral targets for employees, and it turns out that employees who performed sub-optimally (that was the word Keith preferred) on the cyber stuff also showed a tendency to perform sub-optimally when it came to measures of diversity, equity, and inclusion. For each of his assertions, Keith was careful to show a slide and reference the data tables that he had provided links for in his handouts.

“Are you telling us that people who click on phishing links are also prone to being assholes?” Stamper joked when Keith paused for questions. She was one of those people who could get away with swearing in big meetings—no one held it against her. 

“Ah, well, that’s not ...” Keith was flustered. He was NOT one of those people who would ever swear in a big meeting. “That’s not a leap I’d take, but I would say that people who score below average on our cyber matrix also score below average on DEI, and that the worse the score is on one the worse it is on the other. So, you know, definite correlation.”

“Keith, that’s just fantastic—I’d hug you, but isn’t that on our safe workplace matrix?” Stamper joked, and the whole room laughed, not least because they all knew that unwanted physical attention was on the safe workplace matrix that they had started working on. “I wonder how that would correlate with phishing?”

“But seriously,” Stamper continued, “I love your tracking of correlations! I’d tell you why—but I’d rather hear what you guys think. Like, can you all see why tracking the relationships between these behaviors can be so important?”

Amazon wasn’t a place where a leader asked a question and everybody sat there quietly. These were ambitious, smart-as-hell people, for one thing, and they all saw having the best ideas as a great path to getting ahead. So Stamper’s question ignited the room:

“Correlations can help us design better taps.” 

“Correlations can give us insight into invisible drivers of behavior.”

“If we can track these behaviors into the hiring process, we can make better hires.” 

“Uncorrected behaviors probably also correlate, so we can predict how a failure to respond to a tap in one domain might predict behavior in another.” 

Stamper let it burble for a bit, nodding and affirming here, drawing out a point there, but not for long before she laid down her trump card: “Guys, these are all correct, but let’s not forget the big one: efficiency. If we can predict, based on one behavioral clue or violation, what other interventions a person may need, we can get them their behavioral corrections before they even get a tap! We don’t have to wait for someone to get something wrong before we show them how to do it right!”

And then Keith—who had been quiet through this last part—spoke up: “So you’re saying we might deliver a bit of training, or even a small intervention, based entirely on what we predict you’ll do?”

“Yes! Exactly!” gushed Stamper.

“So I could get a Kickstarter on inappropriate physical contact even though I’d never touched anyone?” Keith continued, referring to the little 5-minute learning snippets they were piloting with people before they were allowed to log on to the network.

“That’s the basic idea,” replied Stamper, her tone shifting to match Keith’s seriousness. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could stop unwanted behaviors before they ever started?”

Keith paused. On the one hand, he did think that at the pace they were collecting data, it wouldn’t be long before they could predict behavior in one domain based on what they were gathering in another, and they could intervene accordingly. At the same time, Keith couldn’t help but recognize that not all corrections were working, and to think about some of the feedback they’d gotten, comments that made him wonder if anyone was considering the downside to this little enterprise. Was the value they’d gain from these predictive interventions worth the cost—the cost of alienating some of their employees, or of dampening their overall performance due to their paranoia about the level of behavioral monitoring?

But he couldn’t just come out with that worry, could he? He didn’t have the data to say anything substantive, and he knew where he’d get if he voiced the “feeling” he had that this could backfire. Was this time to have backbone and speak up? Or was this the right time to disagree and commit? Keith decided right then and there that this wasn’t the time to counter Stamper’s enthusiasm. Perhaps he’d raise his concerns with her some other way, ideally when they had more data.

“Keith?” said Stamper. “Are you going to answer my question?”

Keith snapped out of his reverie. 

“Do I think it’s possible to stop unwanted behavior before it starts? Yeah, I think it’s absolutely possible,” he said with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. He just didn’t know if it was a very good idea. But how did he say that?

“I do too!” exclaimed Stamper. “So let’s end it on that note. Folks, here’s my challenge to you: as we expand the number of behavioral domains we’re scanning, let’s lean in on identifying correlations between seemingly unrelated behaviors. The more we know, the better we are able to nudge employees to be the best Amazonians they can be!” A couple people clapped, and there was an energetic murmur as Stamper left the room, smiling at people as she went.

Keith sat back and sighed. This could get complicated, he thought.

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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I’ve made up the story and the characters in it. While certain businesses, places, and events are used to orient the reader in the real world, the characters and actions described are wholly imaginary and any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.

This page is designed to make it easy to catch up on the novel that I started serializing on March 13, 2022 and is now complete on my Fiction home page. You can use the chapter title links to navigate directly to each chapter, and use the navigation at the top and bottom of each chapter to move through the novel. Thanks for reading.

Chapter 1: There’s That Guy in the Van Again

Christopher Dourado recently started a new job at Amazon1, but he tells his friend Dan (the primary narrator) that the level of surveillance there is starting to creep him out. Meanwhile, Dan’s brother, Keith, also works at Amazon, on the Human Dynamics team, which monitors employee behavior. Keith tells Dan that Christopher is starting to cause problems for his team.

Chapter 2: Why Should I Worry?

Our narrator Dan calls up his old friend Kate Stamper, who is Head of Strategy for Human Dynamics at Amazon, to get some perspective on what he’s hearing from Christopher and Keith. When he asks if they are surveilling employees at Amazon, she says “It’s not quite like that.”

Chapter 3: Maneater

We get to know Kate Stamper, the driving force behind the Human Dynamics program at Amazon. Dan narrates how he got to know Stamper, when she worked for him at a small company called Wizards of WBT.

Chapter 4: There Are No Vans on Mountain Tops

Dan checks back in with Christopher, who’s getting even more paranoid about the monitoring that goes on at work. They go out on a hike to Silver Mountain so they can speak freely—but it turns out that Christopher may not be able to escape the tracking.

Chapter 5: Keith Likes Numbers

We get some deep background on Keith, who has a real penchant for data collection and financial analysis, and learn of his excitement when he signed on with Amazon.

Chapter 6: Stamper’s Big Project, Part 1

Stamper’s ambitions around training and behavior change are supercharged when she develops an idea to improve the work at the company where she and Dan work. She puts in motion the ideas that she’ll ultimately take to Amazon.

Chapter 7: Let’s Call It Our War Room!

Stamper presses her team and her company to push harder and faster as they develop her ideas to revolutionize employee performance improvement, and Dan starts to wonder if she’s pushing too far.

Chapter 8: Why Can’t We Go Faster?

Stamper’s drive to create a perfect performance improvement system proves too ambitious for Wizards, even after they take on private equity money, so Stamper quits to find a mysterious new job.

Chapter 9: Screw You and Your Panopticon

Four years later, Dan catches up with Stamper and learns about the job she took (at Amazon) and of the new Human Dynamics team she is leading—a team that utilizes Amazon’s resources and data collection powers to transform the employee experience. Dan raises his worries about the system, but he doesn’t convince Stamper.

Chapter 10: It’s Just Data Analysis

Dan visits with Keith once he’s been at Amazon a while, but Keith refuses to reveal much about his work with the Human Dynamics team. We learn more about Keith’s complex motivations.

Chapter 11: It’s Not Surveillance, It’s Performance Improvement

Stamper tells Dan about the new guy who has taken over at the top of Human Dynamics, Mitch Cascade, and she explains to Dan how their “tap” system is working. She also reveals that she worries they may be pushing things a little too far, confirming some of Dan’s suspicions.

Chapter 12: What If We Could Stop Unwanted Behaviors Before They Started?

Keith prepares his data analysis for a big meeting that Kate Stamper attends, prompting the first meeting between the two of them. Their conversation reveals just how sophisticated the Human Dynamics tap system has become … but Keith wonders how he can go about raising his concerns about the system without appearing disloyal.

Chapter 13: Way to Respond to that Tap Christopher!

Christopher’s a smart guy, but he keeps getting these darned taps interrupting his work—and he starts pushing back.

Chapter 14: Not All Data Is Good Data

Keith inserts a new kind of question into the Daily Pulse survey, raising the ire of Mitch Cascade, who sends Stamper off to find out why. She turns to Keith for answers …

Chapter 15: We’re Not Hiring Sheep

Keith shares the data he’s been gathering with Stamper, and it shows there are troubling signs of resistance to the HD system emerging. Stamper pushes for more—and learns that the resistance seems to be centered around her old friend Christopher Dourado.

Chapter 16: I Knew This Would Cause Trouble

Chapter 17: Stamper Takes an Override

Chapter 18: Cascade Reviews the Data

Chapter 19: Friction

Chapter 20: Verbal Override Requested

Chapter 21: Bury These Friction Reports!

Chapter 22: Swale Canyon Showdown

Chapter 23: Shut This Down!

Chapter 24: Party at Dan’s House

Chapter 25: Two-Way Door

It only took six months for Stamper and I to catch up again, and that put us in prime hiking season, so we agreed to meet up at the Rachel Lake trailhead to try a new-to-me summit, Alta Mountain. I offered to meet her at a park-and-ride and share the ride, but she said she’d prefer to drive alone.

“Remember, you’re still under NDA,” was the first thing she said to me as I pulled in next to her at the trailhead and we both hopped out of our cars.

“Well, good to see you too!” I laughed. “I don’t think I spilled any beans after our first conversation.”

“None that I’ve heard about. But then I hadn’t told you anything particularly interesting,” she teased.

“Ooh, does that mean I get the juicy stuff today? This should be fun.”

“Fun,” Stamper sighed, suddenly serious. “That’s one way to describe it.” 

“Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to hit a sore spot,” I said. “And listen, I’m sorry we got a little heated last time. I promise, I’m not going to be such a pain in the ass this time.” 

“You were fine,” she sighed. “You were just hitting a little too close to home.” 

It was a long hike we were setting out on: a couple miles relatively flat through the woods, then up a set of switchbacks to reach Rachel Lake. Above Rachel Lake we followed a long and glorious ridge to Alta Mountain. Seven miles one way. The long valley-to-summit hikes were my jam—and this one afforded plenty of time for one of the most interesting conversations I’ve had in a long time. 

Stamper put an abrupt end to the light-hearted chit-chat portion of the hike barely a mile in.

“Remember your Stasi comment from our last hike?” she said.

“Yeah, I do, and I’m sorry—that was just me being jealous.”

“More like prescient!” 

“What? Seriously?” I asked.

“Seriously … oh, well, semi-seriously. I’m just a little worried about where we’re going. Can we talk about it? Like, can you help me think about what’s going on?”

“You bet Kate,” I said, softening the conversation with her first name, which I rarely used. “And don’t worry, I know I’m under NDA.”

She smiled and accepted my olive branch.

“So, not long after our last hike, we got a new director in Human Dynamics,” she said.

“Replacing that guy who poached you?” 

“Ha ha, yes, you remember! Anyway, he’s a long-time Amazon guy—like one of the first 200 employees, and he’s been in retail forever. Legend has it that he was one of the people who first unlocked the data tracking that make Amazon product recommendations so precise.”

“I bet that sounded great to you, having someone with that kind of experience.”

“Yeah, it did—I mean, that’s what I’ve been hoping to do for like years. I want to get people information and training just when they need it, but only when they need it. But I need some smart data people and coders to get there. Story of my life!” Stamper said.

“So does he bring that?”

“Oh yeah, in spades. He’s all about using data to understand behavior and generate actions, and he brought along a couple top devs.”

“Isn’t he slumming to come over to Human Dynamics?” I asked. “I mean, those business-data guys usually find training and behavior change kind of squishy.” 

“That’s what I thought too, but he said that once the S-team—that’s the upper level leadership at Amazon—learned about what we were doing with cybersecurity behavior, they all saw the opportunity to do something that would help the company and he jumped at the chance to come over here.”

“God, that’s cool,” I said. “Does that mean you’re getting even more resources to do what you want?”

“Well first, yes, I mean resources are not the issue! Holy shit, it’s like whatever we want to do, we can do. But I’m not so sure on the cool part.”

“I don’t know, getting to do whatever you want sounds pretty good to me!” I said, remembering all the things I had shut down over the years because I knew they would cost too much.

“It does, right up until you realize the guy you’re working for is a sociopath!”

“Oh jeez, what are you talking about?”

“Let me tell you about Mitch Cascade,” she sighed. 

“What, you’re working for a Disney character?” 

“I know, I know, it’s weird, but it’s the perfect name for the guy,” she said.

Mitch Cascade walked into Stamper’s office like he owned the world. “Hey,” he said as he knocked on the open door and waltzed in, “you must be Kate Stamper.” He grinned broadly and stuck out his hand. “I’m your new partner in crime.”

Stamper was immediately struck by how polished he was. He stood about 5’10”, his beautifully graying hair trimmed close, but not too close to hide the slightest wave. He wore tailored blue jeans, no label, and a white button down shirt under a navy blue cashmere sport coat; his shoes were low-cut “tennis shoes,” only made of a lovely mahogany leather. It didn’t take too many days for Stamper to realize that this was his uniform, and it varied only in the shade of the shoes and the color of the shirt. 

Mitch Cascade had a way of looking you right in the eye as if he was waiting for you to say something fascinating. As long as he thought you were on his side, his grin was perpetual. Cascade could have charmed the skin off a snake—and he never stopped trying. 

“Oh hi,” said Stamper. “I wasn’t expecting you until next week.”

“I know, I know,” said Cascade, “but I was dying to get started. I hear you’re doing really cool stuff here. Are you ready to do more? Are you ready to blow this thing up?” He beamed at her. His teeth were perfect.

“That’s how it started,” she told me. “He came in like his sole purpose in life was to help me extend what I was doing.” They spent their first hour together with him just listening to Stamper describe how they were gathering data, how they were creating content to “fix” the human errors that the data showed, and the ingenious ways they were nudging employees to be better at cybersecurity and privacy.

“Kate, this is great,” he said, “just great, but it’s just the start. I want to help you take it further. I mean, have you thought of all the other ways that we could help our employees be better Amazonians?”

“Oh definitely,” Stamper interjected, “like better communicators, better at follow-up …”

“And better managers,” Cascade joined right in, “better innovators, better at giving feedback and direction …” 

“And we can just help people not make mistakes,” said Stamper. “Like why would there ever be a mistake on expensing or reporting, if we can just interject feedback into the experience?”

At this point, they both just leaned back and laughed. They’d barely been talking twenty minutes when they were completing each other’s sentences.

“For a time it was just like that,” Stamper told me. “The first couple months were great: with his encouragement and a lot of times his direct input, we’d take up an area of human performance and then identify what tools we already had in place to identify leading indicators, understand the baseline behaviors, then develop content, and then test all the different ways we had to nudge human performance in the right direction. Our capacity to run tests was just unreal—I mean, with over a million employees, we could do sample runs on our BMTs …”

“Woah woah woah Stamper,” I said, “remember: I don’t know the acronyms.”

“Oh, right,” Stamper laughed. “BMTs: Behavioral Modification Taps. We called them ‘taps’ because we wanted them to just feel like little taps on the shoulder—just a brief, barely noticeable reminder to modify your behavior in the right direction.” 

She described how they’d develop several different styles of “taps” that they’d try out on people, usually groups of 1,000 at a time, to determine “how hard they had to push” to get people going in the right direction. Within a week to 10 days, they had a pretty good sense of what worked and what didn’t, and they’d just put that stuff that worked right into action and move on to the next behavioral target. They always figured these were “two-way doors,” to use a favorite Amazon metaphor: there was nothing they were doing that couldn’t be reversed if it didn’t work.

“Dan, I never met an executive who was willing to move so fast, to just put stuff into action,” she said. “Remember how slow everything went at Wizards, how scared everyone was to take big steps forward? This was the opposite of that. It was pretty thrilling. It’s like Cascade must have had a lot of backing from the top, because there was just no hesitation. It was just, do it. Sometimes it went so fast it made my head spin.” 

Soon enough, they started to generate dashboards on how they were doing at modifying employee behaviors. Stamper described one of them to me:

“We decided that we wanted to make real improvements in discriminatory language,” she explained it. “Like, we wanted to end sexist and racist language in employee communication. Great, right? So we set up flags on all the channels of communication—email, Slack, Chime meetings, even phone calls. So, if people said or wrote anything discriminatory, we could step in.”

“What do you mean, ‘step in?,’” I asked.

“Okay,  say you send an email that says, ‘The ladies in HR are slowing things down,’ or some sexist bullshit like that. Well, you go to send that email, and we block it—like, keep it from sending—and launch a pop-up message that says, ‘Remember, it is Amazon’s policy not to use language that diminishes others based on gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.’ And so then you get to change that language and you don’t offend anyone. Pretty cool! So we implement this and we see that it dramatically reduces the use of discriminatory language in internal communication.”

“So basically you’ve figured out how to keep people from being assholes!” I joked.

“Yeah, that’s about it,” Stamper laughed.

“And you do this on calls and web meetings too?”

“Yeah, it’s not quite as direct there, but we can track what is said in real time, and if there’s something bad, well, it’s not like we can stop it from being said, but we can immediately send a message to their phone or in their chat that identifies the error … and then we can follow up later, and also track whether they continue to make these errors or they improve.” 

“Stamper, this sounds pretty fucked up,” I said. “I mean, you’re listening to people’s calls and immediately pinging them to tell them to stop?”

“You know, I get what you’re saying, but I think we’re okay here: there’s been this big push in the company to let everybody know that discriminatory language isn’t okay, so what we’re really doing is just helping make people aware when they are stepping over the line. It’s not like we’re really penalizing people, we’re just gently nudging them to do the right thing.”

“You said you’re not ‘really penalizing,’” I observed. “Does that mean you’re sort of penalizing?”

“Well, I guess, yeah, but we don’t think of it as penalizing. Basically, we aggregate all the data on each individual and when we see a systematic pattern, we have some escalations in place to correct them.”

“Escalations?”

“You know, like gradually strengthening ‘taps.’ We call them TEs—tap escalations. Most people never go beyond a Level 3 TE.” 

“Oh god! What happens at a Level 3 TE?” I asked.

“Oh, at Level 3 for a discriminatory tap, we end the call or meeting where the infraction occurred, or shut down their email, and they are called into an immediate meeting with an HD specialist. It’s pretty effective. We’ve never had to take the next step.”

“Which is …?”

“Termination.” 

“Wow! That’s intense.”

“I know, but honestly, kind of cool, right? I mean, we’ve figured out how to put an end to discriminatory language in the workplace. In less than six months! Can you believe it?”

“Well, yeah, I can believe it!” I said. “It’s kind of where I feared this stuff was going all along. It sounds to me like you’re escalating the hell out of employee surveillance and you’re totally fine with it. What the hell?”

“It’s not employee surveillance Dan! It’s performance improvement.”

“I know that’s what you’re calling it, but that’s not what it looks like.”

“Look, I have no problem defending this part …,” she trailed off.

“But?” I asked.

“But some of my team is starting to feel a little weird about it.”

< Previous Chapter | First Chapter | Next Chapter >

I was pretty damned excited to hear more about Keith’s job, especially now that I knew he worked on the same team—or at least the same division—with Stamper. But I knew better than to go in “questions blazing” when we went over to dinner at his house a couple weeks after my hike with Stamper. Keith was so careful with what he disclosed about anything, and I knew him well enough to know that if I announced my suspicions about employee surveillance, he’d clam up. I wasn’t making any “panopticon” cracks around him!

We sat out on their back deck and his wife Lori buzzed around, checking on the food, making sure we all had drinks, turning the music up a little, down a little. She was either a great host or had way too much energy. Okay, both. We were on our second beer when I asked, “So Keith, how goes the work?”

“All good,” he replied.

“Is the analytics stuff as interesting as you thought?” I probed. He would have left it there.

“Yeah, it’s good. There’s tons of data, so the real question is how do you find relevant connections.”

“Give me an example,” I said.

“You know, I’m not really supposed to talk about the data we’re gathering.”

“Dude, I’m your brother!” 

“I know, Dan, it’s just not really relevant outside the company—I just don’t think you’d find it very interesting.”

Typical Keith. He wasn’t going to offer me a darn thing, so I played the only card I had in my hand.

“Did I tell you that I know someone else on the Human Dynamics team?” I asked him. “A lady I used to work with at Wizards, Kate Stamper.”

He looked right at me, all serious.

“You know Stamper?” he asked.

“Yeah, I worked really closely with her at Wizards—I may have mentioned her to you, she’s the one who started that project that I worked so much on for several years.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.” No surprise there. Keith just wasn’t curious about other people’s lives, not even his brother’s. But he wanted to know out more about me and Stamper. “How well do you know her? Do you know what she’s doing now?” he asked.

“Keith, I just went on a hike with her a couple weeks ago, and she told me how she was recruited to Human Dynamics based on the work we did together. I’d say I know what she’s doing.”

“I bet what she’s doing now is different,” he said, seeing if he could close the door on the topic.

“Based on what she told me, you guys are finally doing what she wanted to do all along: tracking and modifying human behavior,” I offered.

“She told you this?” 

“After I signed an NDA!” I laughed.

“I fucking hope you signed an NDA,” he barked. Keith never barked. “I guess she can get away with it. She’s treated like she’s some kind of …”

“Keith!!!,” called Lori from inside, “come help me with something a second.”

Keith excused himself and stepped inside, then turned and slid the glass door shut. I could see him and Lori at the back of the kitchen: Lori was talking, talking with her hands; Keith was nodding. It looked serious. Before long, he came back out.

“You were saying,” I prodded, “Stamper was treated like …?” 

“Well, she’s an L9. She’s got a lot of sway. People are really happy to have her.”

“I bet they are—she’s a dynamo. She told me she was pretty pumped about the behavioral improvements you were seeing. What’s that look like from your perspective?”

“It’s just a job, Dan. It’s just data analysis.” 

“Yeah, but I’m so curious about what you’re doing with that data …” Typical conversation with me and my brother: I push too hard, he withdraws. 

“I’m just analyzing it. I’m not overthinking it,” he said. “It’s just work. You ready for another beer?” And with that, he shut the door on the conversation and I couldn’t open it back up. I’d had Keith shut me down before, or shut me out. He had a way of bottling things up that I’d never understood. Was it a lack of curiosity? Did he not want to see what was right in front of him? Or was there something there he didn’t know quite what to do with? I honestly couldn’t tell, but I had my suspicions.

There was a time, years ago, when Erin and I were visiting Keith and Lori when they lived in an apartment in Evanston, just north of Chicago. We had enjoyed dinner and Lori went into the kitchen to get dessert when she called out, “Keith, look at this ice cream!”

She stood in the doorway and held out a paper carton of ice cream, and it was plain to see that the ice cream was soup, just sloshing around in the box. It wasn’t remotely frozen. 

“I told you, this freezer isn’t keeping anything frozen!” Lori had a way of saying things with a rising tone that sounded like alarm, even about something as simple as melting ice cream.

“Well maybe you’re opening the freezer door too much,” he replied, calm as can be. “Have you been getting stuff in and out a lot while making dinner?”

“Keith, I haven’t opened it since yesterday, when I showed you the same thing, cause I wanted to prove it to you.” She was positioned beside the freezer, one hand on the freezer door, the other imploring Keith to come look.

But Keith wouldn’t be drawn in. “Well I’m not sure that proves anything Lori,” he said, “maybe it’s just one of those ice creams that take a while to freeze, or that you’re supposed to eat soft.”

“Keith,” Lori wailed, “there’s no ice cream like that!! I could pour this.”

“I just don’t know why you’re getting upset about it, Lori,” Keith reasoned, “just put it back in and don’t open the door for a while.” 

“But Keith, it’s been doing this for a week …”

We had apparently come into a conversation that they’d had multiple times over the last week, and Keith just absolutely, obstinately DID NOT want to see that their freezer was broken. He just wasn’t going to acknowledge it, and if he didn’t acknowledge it, then to him it didn’t exist. 

As Erin and I drove back to our hotel room that night, I said to her: “You know, Keith’s always been like that: if he doesn’t want to accept something, he just denies it or pretends it doesn’t exist. It’s really weird.”

He’d been like this as a kid, and I guess I thought it was a defense mechanism he developed growing up amidst the low-grade warfare between our parents. I knew by the time I was 10 years old that my parents were doomed for divorce, because they just treated each other like shit: Dad offered little warmth and affection to my mom, but plenty of criticism, and Mom returned the favor with a steady stream of disdain and nasty digs. I made the mistake of engaging in it, trying to solve it, and ended up playing the middle man between my warring parents.

Not Keith. Keith just shut it out. When the sniping started, he’d just leave—he’d go up to his room or watch TV or go out to the barn. I’d complain to him about it, or ask him if he thought our folks should get divorced, and he’d look at me like he didn’t even know what I was talking about. “I don’t know Dan. Why worry about it?” 

That night after the unfrozen ice cream, I realized that this was just Keith: if he didn’t want to deal with something, he just put it in a box and didn’t think about it. He once drove this piece-of-shit Saab and the floorboards were rusting out, and I’d say to him, “You better be careful, your foot’s going to go right through that,” and he’d day, “Nah, there’s plenty of metal there,” right up until the moment his heel went right through the floor on some hard braking. Lori once said he wouldn’t admit their furnace was broken until they couldn’t get the house over 55 degrees and she threatened to go to a hotel without him. Mostly he just wanted to ignore whatever he could until it went away.

But it wasn’t absolute; he could reach a breaking point. I’d seen it happen once, when we were pretty young. One day, Mom and Dad were in the kitchen, fighting. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I started to go up the stairs and there was Keith, sitting at the top of the steps, tears streaming down his face. I sat down next to him and put my arm around him.

“Do you think Mom and Dad will get divorced?” he sobbed. 

“I don’t know,” I replied honestly, and I didn’t. 

“Do you think it’s my fault?” Keith choked out. My god, he was in agony. 

“It’s not your fault, Keith. I don’t think it’s my fault. I just don’t know what we can do.” 

“I don’t want them to get divorced,” he moaned. 

And we just sat on the stairs, listening, until Mom huffed out of the kitchen. Soon we heard the crackle of tires on the gravel driveway as she drove away. Then we both went to our rooms. 

You know what I took from this? Keith had a breaking point. Things could get through to Keith, if they got bad enough. I wondered how long it would take for him to reach this breaking point at work. And I wondered if I’d ever know about it.

< Previous Chapter | First Chapter | Next Chapter >

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I’ve made up the story and the characters in it. While certain businesses, places, and events are used to orient the reader in the real world, the characters and actions described are wholly imaginary and any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.

Four years after she left Wizards, Stamper called me out of the blue. 

“What the hell?!” I said once I figured out that it was really her. “How great to hear from you!! How’ve you been?”

And we jumped right in, laughing, catching up on all the little stuff (her finally having a serious boyfriend, my kids growing up and heading off to college), just like the old friends that we were, without touching once on the last time we had talked or why it had been so long. That was nice. But I had to ask:

“Stamper, where the hell have you been?”

“Oh, just right here in Seattle, I mean, we moved into a condo we bought, but I’ve been around.” 

“You know that’s not what I meant,” I pressed.

“I know, I know, look, I’m sorry, I just … well, I just left Wizards and absolutely lost myself in this new job. Dan, it’s been so wild, so exactly what I was hoping for …”

“Stamper, you know I don’t even know where you went!”

“What?” she said. “I didn’t tell you? C’mon, I must have told you.”

“The last thing you said was, I’ll tell you as soon as I start.” 

 “Oops!” she said and laughed, a sincere, self-deprecating laugh.

I know I’ve painted Stamper as a real hard-ass, and she is, but I never suspected her of being mean or intentionally hurtful. She just wasn’t at all concerned with what other people thought when she was focused on other things. I kind of admire that about her.

“It was so exciting starting this new thing, Dan, I just kind of got lost in it, I mean, I have such a great team and I was given access to so much, just, muscle …”

“Stamper, where are you? Where are you working?”

“Oh shit Dan, I have so much to tell you … and listen, some of it, well, I trust you, but I’m supposed to have you sign an NDA if I say anything.”

“Seriously, you want me to sign an NDA for a conversation with an old friend?”

“That’s the joy of working for a big company! It’s no big deal, really, I’ll send it over and then let’s get together for coffee or a beer … or, are you still hiking? Maybe we go on a hike?”

Well, she knew what made me tick. I’d pretty much go on a hike with anyone who could keep up, even if I did have to sign a damned NDA. So we set it up a hike, and I signed the digital form, and I finally got to hear the full story. Well, I guess it was the full story.

A week later we set out on a snowshoe hike. It was late enough in the season for the avalanche danger to be gone but not so late that the snow was totally compacted. Plus it was a rare bluebird day in March, when it’s usually socked in with clouds, so we were in pretty high spirits. High enough that when we met at the park and ride and she started dragging her gear out of the back of her Subaru to throw in my car, the first thing I said was, “I can’t let you in my car unless you tell me where you work.”

“Oh for god’s sake, ” she said, “I’m at Amazon, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make such a big mystery out of it, it’s just, …”

“Ah, don’t worry about it, I was just giving you shit,” I said. “I figured you went to one of the big guys, either Microsoft or Google or Amazon. But remember, you didn’t tell me anything when you were winding down at Wizards, I’m dying to hear the whole story.”

“God, that was such a weird time! I was so disappointed that we couldn’t push harder, and you seemed kind of stuck … I’m sorry, but it’s true … just like stuck trying to play the game there,” she said. She had nailed that one.  “But remember when you and I published that article about risk-based content delivery? I think it was before those Duke idiots got involved in the company? Well, someone at Amazon reached out to me and said he was interested in what we were doing, asked if I could have coffee. So I did.”

In the back of my mind I wondered why he hadn’t contacted me too—I was co-author on that article—but maybe he figured I was too tied into running the company to entertain what he ended up proposing to Stamper. (Or maybe Stamper told him I was stuck, I don’t know.) Anyway, he tried to woo her into coming to Amazon right then, but she told him she was having too much fun but that she’d be in touch if that changed. When she called a few weeks later to tell him that the private equity investment wasn’t bringing the acceleration she had hoped for, he suggested that at a company like Amazon, she’d have access to some of the best talent and the deepest pockets of any company in the world.

“I wasn’t a pushover, Dan,” Stamper insisted. “You know how bullish I was on what we were after! I told them that I had a plan to totally re-invent how we managed employee performance and I was only interested in moving if I thought they could help me pursue this dream. I told him I needed total control and access to the budget I’d need to make it happen.”

“You asked for ‘total control?’”

“You know I did! Of course I didn’t get it. The guy—his name is Shreed—told me that ‘total control’ was only available to Level 10 and above, and even then, at the level I was talking about, stuff still had to get approval from Bezos himself. But Dan, he said that Bezos knew about what I was trying to do and had personally given him the green light to bring me in.” 

“That must have felt good” I said.

“Hell yes, it was flattering—especially after we had Mike slow-rolling everything, then those PE assholes barely giving my work … I’m sorry, our work … the time of day.” 

“No worries—it was always your work,” I admitted.

“But then, he started asking about the IP behind these ideas, and I was like, ‘I don’t know anything about intellectual property, I leave that stuff to Dan.’ Remember when I asked you about patents? I was trying to figure out whether we had applied for any patents on any of these ideas …”

“And of course we didn’t!” I lamented. “We were honestly going as fast as we could, and neither Nels nor Mike thought it was worth slowing down to patent any of these ideas.”

“Well, I didn’t know either, but Shreed was glad to hear we hadn’t, because then he said it would be fine for them to hire me … and Dan, honestly, he made it sound really good. I mean, there’s great money, that’s part of it, but what he promised me was that I would be given the team and the budget and the control to get this done. Hell, they were forming a new business unit just for this purpose, the Human Dynamics Team, and they offered me the Head of Strategy position. I couldn’t say no.”

“Okay, that explains a lot,” I said. “You got a little dodgy there at the end, but I guess I would have too. But hey, it sounds perfect for you … how’s it been going?”

“Oh my god Dan, it’s been unreal. It was unreal from day one! You remember how the thing I was just dying to get to was the identification of behaviors that we wanted to change? Well, they were already well down the road to having that one solved. In the first place, we have complete visibility into what employees are doing on their computer and also on their phones, since you have to install this Amazon connection app to connect to the network …”

And then, for the next 90 minutes—interrupted as often by her reminders that we were under NDA as it was by my questions—she broke down what they were doing. Stamper had gotten a lot smarter on the technical side of the game, so some of it got pretty nerdy, nerdier than I could keep up with, but mostly it was just the fully fleshed out manifestation of those conversations we’d had from the start. I got it in Stamper’s typical headlong rush of words:

“So, basically, everything employees do is connected to our network, and our IT team is really good at making sure everything is well integrated, so they can see whether people are using decent passwords, and they can control the flow of protected information with deep inspection of any of the email or file transfers or anything. That kind of stuff. I mean, basically, they can just prevent most of the stupid stuff that we’d try to train people about, so people couldn’t really make a lot of the mistakes we’d see. I mean, they could try, but we could see them trying, and we could just pop up little messages on their screen in real time saying something like, ‘Remember, we can only send healthcare data when we have a signed agreement,’ or something like that.”

“My first few months there, it was just me getting familiar with everything that we could detect and then seeing if we could figure out how to intervene right at the moment to give people a little nudge in the right direction. The nudging stuff was a blast: I had access to some good writers and graphic artists, and we’d create these fun little characters to make it so our stuff wasn’t boring. And we’d escalate when we needed to: like the first time, you just get this tiny little reminder, but then if you tried to do something wrong the next time, it might be longer, and then longer still if you kept doing it. It’s pretty intense what we could know about people with all the data we can gather.”

“But c’mon, who has time to deal with all that data you gather?” I objected. “I mean, what’s the point?”

“You only think that because you’ve worked at companies that aren’t very good with data! Dealing with this stuff is nothing at Amazon. It’s nothing! Like, we’d set up a protocol for each risk we were tracking, and you’d go through these levels of graduated ‘training,’ but if you were still taking a risky action after getting level 3 training—that’s what we called it—well then, you’d kind of go into this different category. We’d notify your manager, and your score would go into your profile for consideration during the annual review. You know how we used to say that people should get fired if they couldn’t figure out cybersecurity? Well, here it’s real. I mean, we’ll try to get you to improve, but if you just can’t or won’t, well, you’re sending us a pretty clear signal that you’re not interested in living the leadership principles.” 

I ignored the “leadership principles” bit; I had gotten used to that from the Amazonians I knew. But I was ready interested in how they locked in on these complicated behavioral things I knew Stamper was trying to change. 

“Look, that sounds fine for the cut-and-dried stuff, but what about the harder stuff—the really tricky phishing and the social engineering?” I asked.

“No, no, you’re right—the easy stuff was pretty straightforward, since we had the tech in place to monitor and deliver it. But it really got fun with the phishing and social engineering, because we had all this data about our employees, we could craft these really sophisticated phishing campaigns based upon individual profiles. Remember we used to tell people to send out a fake phishing email to everybody? They laughed at me when I told them about that. Here, we put them into a profile class right when they’re hired—based on all the data we’ve gathered from the hiring process—and then we use all this other contextual data—who they work with, who they correspond with outside the company, what they list as their hobbies, etc.—to really hone in and target fake phishes. And we track how they respond to them—not just do they delete it or do they click a link, but how long they look at it before they delete, or whether they forward it to their home email, just like anything that would show they were susceptible.”

“Wow, if only you could implant chips in their brains and observe whether they were tempted or not, then you’d really have them,” I ribbed her.

“Fuck you Dan,” she snapped. “You always wanted to take this over into the dark, Big Brother shit and it’s not like that!”

“Oh c’mon, it is like that!” 

“It’s not!” she insisted, and with some vigor. “Dan, I swear, we’re only looking at the stuff that directly impacts the company’s security—and only on stuff that employees agreed that they’d do. We’re just holding people accountable.” 

“Is that your word, ‘accountable’? Cuz it sounds a lot like corporate bullshit or worse to me. Or like something the Stasi said as they spied on people.”

“Oh there you go, Mr. know-it-all—who the hell are the Stasi?” she jabbed back.

“They were the East German secret police. They gathered information on every East German citizen to keep them in line.”

“C’mon Dan, you know I don’t want to be part of the Stasi,” she said. I think she was a little hurt that I’d go there. She was such a complicated person: one minute hard-ass, the next sensitive flower. But then the hard-ass was back: “I still think this is reasonable, what we’re doing. I know there’s a line we don’t want to cross, and I’m not going to cross it!”

“Okay, I’ll quit busting your balls. But I want to know, what do you do with this information you gather on people? I mean, for example you know I looked long and hard at that ‘win a free vacation’ email before I deleted it? So what?”

“Think about it Dan—if you’re intrigued by that email, what is that telling me as your employer? Are you not happy in your job? Are you daydreaming about vacation when you should be working? Do you wish you had more money to vacation—so that maybe you’d be susceptible to a bribe? There’s lots of ways you could be a risk to the company.”

“Yeah, but maybe it’s just a gray day outside and they stopped for a minute to think about sunshine—I mean, that’s not exactly a risk to the company.”

“That’s why we gather so much data, Dan—it’s not like we’re going to overreact to one data point. It’s if we see a trend over time, then we maybe use related data to see if we’ve got an issue.”

It’s funny, I used to get pretty excited about what Stamper wanted to do, about where she wanted to take this integration between behavioral detection and training, but now that I heard where it had taken her, it just seemed kind of creepy and sad: creepy for the employee, who knew that no matter what they did, their employer was monitoring them and taking note of what they did, and sad for Stamper and the people she worked with, the Human Dynamics team, because for all the power of their technology, all they were really doing was spying on people in order to reduce the risk of human error. Was it really worth it?

That’s what I wanted to know, and I pushed her on it. “So Stamper, here’s my question: What the hell does this get you? You’re describing a nightmare for employees, who know that you are tracking their every move, and it sounds like a nightmare for you prison guards too, who can see everything and stop any problem before it even happens. Congratulations, you’ve created a panopticon!”

“Screw you and your panopticon nonsense, Dan,” she said. “You’re just jealous because you’re stuck at Wizards doing the same old shit.” 

She had me there. And her putting it that way just made me want to change the subject. Luckily we were pulling up to the trailhead, so we got distracted by unpacking the car, putting on our gear, and heading off into the untracked snow. It’s a good friend you can butt heads with for an hour, and then set it aside and have a great hike. By the time we were through, we agreed we’d have to do it again soon.

< Previous Chapter | First Chapter | Next Chapter >

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I’ve made up the story and the characters in it. While certain businesses, places, and events are used to orient the reader in the real world, the characters and actions described are wholly imaginary and any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.

The next weeks and months were a flurry of activity. Faster than I thought possible, we had a large part of our existing “curriculum” converted over to our new model. We called our content BBs—it was short for building blocks, and it emphasized their small size—and we sorted our content into our two specialties, Security BBs and Privacy BBs. 

Before long, we had it in the kind of shape where we could show it off to customers. We’d get on a web meeting and help people see what we were doing: how they could save time and money by reducing training time, how much better it would be to only focus on what mattered, how much happier employees would be (well, maybe not happier, but less irritated). Once we got it all working—I should say once Kate and Mark got it working, they were the technical brains behind it—it didn’t take long to build an online tool that allowed people to snap together our BBs like Lego building blocks to construct training however they wanted. We called it the BB Machine. Marketing had a name for it that went on the website—it doesn't even matter now what it was.

I thought our progress merited a team celebration—but Stamper had other ideas. “Just you and me, Dan,” she snapped at my suggestion that we invite everybody to the bar. “I’ve got something I need to talk to you about.” 

No sooner had the waiter set down the beers than Stamper started in.

“When can we start moving faster?” she demanded.

“Faster?” I asked, wide-eyed.

“Faster!!! This was the easy stuff, the content, the assembly tool. So what!!! Who cares? The real action is in identifying the behavior and changing it. When are we going to get to that? I wanna get to that!!!” She actually banged her fist on the table.

“Stamper, this is the fastest I’ve ever seen the company move! Can’t we sit back and revel in what we’ve done a little bit? When Nels and I think about what we’ve done so far, we can’t even believe it.” It was true: our BBs were a huge success. Our team loved this approach to building content and our customers loved it too. Most importantly, “the market” loved it. We had started getting calls from analysts who wanted to see what we were doing. Gartner and Forrester rated us highly, which led to more sales, and soon we had investors knocking on the door—and no one heard that knock louder than Stamper. 

There was a fire burning inside Stamper before investors started sniffing around the company, but the prospect of investment money was like pouring gasoline on the fire. She just assumed that the money would flow directly to her project—and here I was telling her it wasn’t going to happen all that fast.

“Mike wants us to talk to several investment firms, and then there’s going to be the due diligence stage, and then it takes a while for the deal to close …,” I repeated what I had been hearing; it’s not like I was an expert. But even I could see that this wasn’t going to happen overnight.

“We’ll get investment money,” I assured Stamper (and myself), “but it’s going to take some time. We’ve just got to be a little patient.” 

“I don’t want to be patient!” she barked. “We need to get some smarter developers in here and we’ve got to partner with some of the bigger companies. Why can’t we go faster?”

“Stamper, we can’t just wave a magic wand and make that happen!”

“Why not? This content work took twice as long as it should have because we had to do the work on the side, because Mike wouldn’t just take us off other work and let us run with this. Why can’t he see that he should be going all in on this?”

“Mike’s run this company for 25 years. We’ve got to respect his caution—he doesn’t want to put all his eggs in one basket.” Nels reminded me of this all the time. It was partly Mike’s caution that kept our company so stable.

“I don’t want to respect his caution!! I want us to grab some developers and run with this. Why can’t Mike get out of the way?”

“Mike owns the company!” I inserted.

“I don’t care! Can’t he see this is our chance to do something huge? He’s lucky to have us. He should be borrowing to fund the next steps, or selling the company to someone who has the courage to fucking move faster!”

I like Stamper. You can tell I do. But dammit she could be a petulant baby sometimes. She wanted what she wanted and she wanted it now. But I reminded her that we could only move as fast as the system we were in would allow, that she was still the visionary and that she just needed to trust that soon we would have the investment to move this forward. I flattered her, which helped, but I could see in her eyes that her view of me was changing. Was that the day that I began to look less like a partner and more like a roadblock? She could have rolled me right then and there, but she didn’t.

“Fine, fine, I know, I’m impatient,” she said. “But when do I get to meet with these investors? I know I can get them to see that we need money and brains to move this faster. Just let me convince them.”

This is where I failed. Me, Nels—maybe Stamper even. You see, we were stupid about investors, at least the kind of investors Mike was bringing in. We thought that once they saw and understood what we were doing, when they grasped Stamper’s vision, they couldn’t help but throw money at us. So we dreamed big when the investors came in, and when we got to talk to them, Stamper and I, we tantalized them with our grand ideas about technology that could sense what employees knew and didn’t know, and how we’d use that technology to revolutionize the way we delivered training. Great content, we gushed, delivered just to the people who needed it. Happier people. Less time wasted. More money, for us, sure, but also for our customers. How could they not pour their gasoline on this fire, turning it into a mighty blaze? 

When we were finally given time to brief the investors on our product development plans, Stamper got so damned excited about what we could do, where we could go with these ideas, that she had these guys (and yeah, it was all guys, young East Coast guys) eating out of her hands, even though she was mostly talking about content variations and sensing technology and user behavior analytics. They could see how Stamper burned to take our ideas to the next level—but mostly, they saw a cash cow. We were describing the tech we wanted to build, but here’s what the investors heard: “Blah blah blah money. Blah blah blah blah sales. Blah blah blah recurring revenue.” It wasn’t our product they were interested in; it was six straight quarters of accelerating growth and the promise of a recurring revenue stream. They weren’t concerned with how we built it—that was not their business and they didn’t really understand all that tech stuff anyway—but they could sure as hell see that they could make a bunch of money off it, and that was all they needed to know. But we didn’t see all that. 

When the PE boys bought in, they bought in big, taking a controlling interest in the company. We just assumed that a big chunk of their money was going to get poured directly into helping us build out the next stages of Stamper’s vision—the technology that would identify human behavior and flag it for improvement, the technology that would deliver the cool content we were building. 

“Dan, we’re going to get to build this!” Stamper gushed to me soon after the PE deal closed.

“I know! We’ve got to think about what to do first: hire devs or start talking to some of the big IT infrastructure companies about partnerships,” I said.

“I wanna hire the devs,” she said. “I wanna find the smartest, wildest thinkers we can get! You’re better at those partnership discussions. Can we start now? Please, please.” She could be so damned charming.

“Well, I haven’t been given budget yet,” I cautioned her. I explained that it was going to take a couple weeks for the transaction to complete, and then we’d have to decide as a management team how quickly we could move. “I still think we need a little patience.”

Patience! What was I thinking to counsel patience? You can’t counsel patience to an avalanche roaring down a hill, nor to a wave crashing on the shore, and I should have known better than to use that word with Stamper. She wanted to keep pushing and I should have found a way to direct her energy, but instead I counseled patience.

Here’s how it played out:

“Dan, why are we hiring so many sales people?” Stamper asked when the first big “play” from the PE team was to double the size of the sales team. (They called it a “play” and it came from their “playbook.” Jocks!) I explained to Stamper that the PE guys wanted to get some clear buy signs from the market and the only way to do that was to get more sales conversations. I almost believed it myself. The way I spun it to Stamper was that the PE guys implied the next step was hiring developers and building out the technical side of our solution, the “product.”  But “implied” was the operative word. They never once mentioned a “play” that involved investing in product. I just wanted that to be true.

“Why do we need a new CEO? Mike gets what we’re trying to do!” Stamper moaned to me after Mike announced that he was going to step aside as soon as they completed a CEO search. “I’ll miss Mike too,” I said, truthfully, “but the board thinks we need a CEO with more high-growth experience and a better understanding of ARR and the KPIs needed to fuel ARR growth, and you know, I agree with them.” I’d started down a slippery slope, using that language, but I was trying to see the world through the eyes of the investors. 

As they explained it, we’d invest more in the technology once we proved that we could increase our funnel and our conversion rates and start reliably hitting monthly recurring revenue targets. There was some mumbo jumbo about organic vs inorganic, but my eyes glazed over at this stuff. I just naively believed that at some point we’d turn the money stream into product development. Stupid me. When I talked like this—when I tried to parrot the investor’s language—I could see the light dim in Stamper’s eyes. She might be able to stomach the “be patient” talk from me and Mike, but she couldn’t take it from the PE guys. They were supposed to be the ones bringing the action.

When the new CEO came in, I convinced her that we’d start to see some changes. And, I offered hopefully, “We’ve got a slot at the first board meeting with the new CEO.” I showed her the agenda. She scanned it quickly. 

“10 minutes? They’re giving us 10 minutes?! And we’re last?!! Are you fucking kidding me? Do they even give a shit about what we’re trying to build?” Stamper slammed her hand on my desk, demanding an answer.

“Look,” I said, “they still think that product is important, it’s just that they really want the executive leadership team to focus on sales and marketing. Besides, we’re in good shape, so there’s not much to report.”

“This is what you keep missing Dan: the content may be in good shape, but the technology sucks. Who gives a shit about having good content if we can’t identify who needs it and and we can’t deliver it quickly and we can’t fucking measure how people are doing! We’re never going to do that without money and talent!”

When I think back, I think this is where the tables turned with Stamper and me. I think that right here was the moment she saw that I had become a roadblock and it was only our enduring friendship that kept it as civil as it was.

But I trotted out my rationale, assuring her that we were still the heart of the company, that what we were doing was important … I may have even said that we should keep playing for the long con. But by this point, I’m not even sure I believed it myself any more. It was pretty clear that the CEO didn’t really get our vision and the people he brought in didn’t speak our language either. I tried to delude myself with my reassurances—but I wasn’t fooling Stamper. 

The board meeting was a disaster. The hour allotted to sales and marketing blew up into two-and-a-half hours of hard questions and weak answers, and then the finance review got bogged down in EBIDTA. My joke about EBIDTA BIBIDTA fell flat, and our 10 minutes got crushed down to “just give us a quick update.” I could sense that Stamper was seething, but I put my hand on her forearm and just gave them a quick update on new content releases. I didn’t tell them that we couldn’t make any headway on our prediction engine until we hired more developers. It just didn’t seem like the right time to press for new hires. 

Stamper was waiting for me when I arrived at work the next day. “We’ve got to talk,” she said as she pulled shut my office door. And just like that, it was all over. Stamper was moving on—she couldn’t tell me where just yet, but she would soon.

I wanted to be mad—but I wasn’t. I got it. Our company had gone from being a really cool place to being a complete clown-show faster than you could spell “private equity” and no one knew that better than me. Hell, I kicked myself for not having the guts to just quit myself, leave it all behind and try again somewhere new, but I had poured so much of myself into this place, hired so many of the people who were still there, that I just kept telling myself to give it a little more time, maybe we can turn it around.

If he was still with the company, Nels would have been mad, would have tried to talk her out of it, appealed to her loyalty and maybe even laid a guilt trip on her. But Nels hadn’t survived the CEO change, and I couldn’t bring myself to lie to her any more. Besides, I wanted more for her than what we had going—I wanted her to get what she was after, and I knew she had to go to do it. So I worked with her to shut things down and she took off a few days later. We promised to keep in touch and we did, eventually.

“I’ll tell you more about it after I start,” she promised. And then she dropped off the face of the earth.

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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I’ve made up the story and the characters in it. While certain businesses, places, and events are used to orient the reader in the real world, the characters and actions described are wholly imaginary and any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.

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