Let’s Call It Our War Room!
Chapter 7 in my ongoing story about workplace surveillance
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This next part gets hard for me to tell because I’m just too close to it and, truth be told, it just kind of hurts. It hurts because it was the last time I got to work with Stamper, it hurts because I can see now that this was probably the high point of my professional life, and it hurts because if I look at myself in the mirror, I have to blame myself, because I played it too safe and that doomed me to—well, fuck it—it doomed me to mediocrity. Okay, maybe not mediocrity, but I missed the chance to chase after the big, scary, fun stuff that Stamper was after. If only I’d had the nerve to think as big as Stamper, if only I’d pushed harder to get what I wanted, even if it pissed people off … well, maybe things would have been different.
But this is Stamper’s story, not mine. It’s about Stamper and where she took this idea, first at Wizards and later, much more dramatically, at Amazon. So I’ll do my best to tell you how it all went down and if I sometimes get a little bogged down in some details, well, that was my job, the details, and it’s only in retrospect that I can see what a chance I missed.
On the very afternoon that she first shared her big idea with me, she was back at my office door, clearly still burning to talk.
“Can we talk more about our project?” She grinned. The word I fixed on in that sentence? “Our.”
“Yeah, I’m ready—but let’s go down to the big conference room,” I said, because Mike’s office shared a wall with mine and I never knew how much he could hear from my office, or if he might pop his head in. Mike is our CEO, and I knew we’d need to get his buy-in on this eventually, but I was nowhere near ready to let him hear phrases like “blow it up and start over” and “we can’t be a training company anymore.” I knew we had to warm him up to it and that we had better have some sense of cost projections, and we were nowhere near that.
“Hey, let’s not call it the conference room, let’s call it our war room,” said Stamper conspiratorially as we walked down between the cubicles.
Our offices weren’t sexy: off-white walls, gray carpets, and drab, gray paneled cubicles clustered into quads. The most coveted of the cubicles—at least for the non-developers—lined the windows that looked out onto the parking lot. (The developers shunned the light and clustered along the interior walls.) A few of us—management, of course—got the offices with doors, clustered at the far end of the hall. At the most, we could fit 40 people into the office, but 40 felt crowded. On any given day, there were only 20 or so people there.
We were in a small office park in Bothell, WA, sharing a building with a cable installation company and a healthcare call center whose employees were among the least healthy people I had ever seen. (We gave some of them nicknames: there was Little Limpy Jimmy, who looked like Gene Wilder’s Igor from Young Frankenstein, and Trailer Park Barbie, who paced in front of my office window smoking, her teased hair and harrowed eyes testament to a hard life.)
What became the “war room” was a long room with a single oval table around which sat eight office chairs. The art on the walls was a source of derision to all—but a derision we never mentioned in front of Mike or his wife, Beth, who were rumored to like the art. But it had a couple big whiteboards we could use to sketch out our ideas and it had decent erasers.
“The first step,” I said to Stamper as I closed the door, “is to break it down into a series of smaller projects.” I was already thinking like the project manager that I was, thinking about dependencies and “resources” (meaning, people) and all the little roadblocks we might encounter along the way. So we started laying it out: Stamper chomping at the bit and trying to race ahead, imagining where we could go, and me pulling back on the reins, trying to break everything down into smaller parts, to predict the logical progressions of steps, foresee the contingencies and requirements.
Stamper and I agreed that in order to meet her big goals, we’d share duties: she would be the wild-eyed visionary, and I would be the careful planner. Her job was to dream big, to push hard for this “revolution” she thought she was leading. My job was to slow things down, make sure we covered all the bases as we went, that we got Mike’s buy-in and that we involved the team. Stamper didn’t mind me playing this role—in fact, she needed it—as long as she trusted that I wasn’t trying to put roadblocks in her way, and I wasn’t, or at least I didn’t think of them as roadblocks. But I knew that the moment she thought I or anyone else trying to slow her down, her inclination would be to lower her shoulder and knock them over.
We worked for two hours and at the end of that time, we thought we had identified three key stages to the project: blow up the content and reconstruct it in “bite-size” building blocks, with each building block tied to an employee behavior we wanted to change; build software to allow our clients to assemble these building blocks to address their behavioral goals; then automate the detection of human behavior so that we could automatically deliver content to people based on their unique behaviors. Simple, right? I knew we could do the first one; Stamper and I could see it clear as day. There were a lot of unanswered questions after that but at this point our attitude was, we’re smart, we’ll figure it out. At least that’s how we felt when we said goodnight and vowed to get started the next day. By the time we walked out, the office was a ghost town.
To get going on the first step—the content, the stuff we were most familiar with—we’d need a couple other people to join us. We’d need Nels, who’d been around forever and who couldn’t stand to be left out of anything, and who probably understood how to get Mike on board better than anyone. But we also needed more tech talent, specifically someone to call bullshit on our crazy ideas about what the code could do, so we quickly added Kate—the other Kate, the quiet coder, who was also one of the only woman I ever saw Stamper get along with—and Mark, our QA guy and master troubleshooter, who’d sit back with a bemused smile, knowing he’d be called upon to verify that it all worked.
The first thing we had to do—the first thing Stamper had to do, really—was to get them all up to speed, and it’s not like they were sheep, just waiting to be led. They had all been in this business long enough to have their own opinions about good and bad. Luckily, they all shared Stamper’s basic belief about our existing content: that the courses were too long, too difficult to modify, too boring. So they were ready when Stamper got going:
“People in HR and compliance and infosec all think that they can compile this big pile of stuff they want to train people on and then insist that they take these overlong courses, and they think that’s going to get them where they want to be! But it’s not and we all know it.”
We did all know it. We knew that every department within big companies created the training they thought people needed (or hired companies like ours to do it for them), and pretty soon you had employees slogging through hours and hours of required training, wasting time and passing dumbed down “assessments” at the end. It was like the worst parts of high school, only mutated and embedded in corporations.
Stamper was done with that, and she needed to know that we were done with it too. “What’s the point of training, Dan?” she asked, directing the question at me because she still wasn’t sure she could trust the others. But she didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s to be sure that employees know and do what they need to do to perform, to meet company expectations! So the first thing we’ve got to do is only focus on things people don’t already know how to do—not train everybody to do stuff they already know. Like, if people can show that they know how to add 2 + 2, we don’t teach them math. Same with cybersecurity—if people can reliably make strong passwords or identify phishing, why do we make them take a course on it? If we figure out which behaviors we want to see, and then measure them, we can then ‘train’ them only on the behaviors that they haven’t currently mastered.”
“The problem, though,” Nels countered, “is that there are maybe 15 things we need people to know how to do. Since we can’t know in advance which ones they already know, we just have to teach them about all 15. I mean, it’s not perfect, but it’s what we know how to do.”
Saying “it’s not perfect” to Stamper was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Her eyes glowed, her nostrils flared, and her expression combined “you’re an idiot” with “I will crush you”—but that all passed in a flash, and her actual response was tempered by her affection for Nels, who was hard not to like. As much of a bulldozer as Stamper was, if she liked you, she’d ease up … a little.
“That’s why we’ve got to blow it up, silly!,” she smiled. “Because it’s not perfect.”
“But what do you do in its place?”
“You build a bunch of super small ‘units’ of instruction, as small as possible, each one focused on a single behavior we want to change,” Stamper explained. “Then, at just the point that the person manifests the behavior you want to change, you deliver the smallest possible unit of instruction. It’s precise and targeted and meaningful.”
“You know what Theresa and April are going to say,” Kate countered half-heartedly. ”People want a story, they want real life examples, and it just takes time to weave those all together.” Kate never wanted to hurt anybody, so she was trying to salvage what mattered to these people she had worked with for years.
“I’m sure Theresa and April can find someone to pay them for their hour-long cut-rate telenovelas,” countered Stamper, “but we’re moving in another direction. Fuck them.”
“I don’t know,” said Mark, “it all sounds a little creepy to me—like I’m being spied on, to figure out what I’m doing wrong, and then you pounce on me with training.”
“Yeah, I get that,” said Stamper, “but wouldn’t you be willing to tolerate being watched if it meant you didn’t have to take an hour of stupid training? And it’s not like you’re not being watched anyway—it’s just that now you’re made aware of it.”
“Well I’d like to not be watched at all,” said Mark.
“That train has left the station buddy,” I observed.
And that’s the way it went for the next several hours, Stamper opining; Nels, Kate, and Mark considering, objecting, giving in; me chipping in to support Stamper along the way, trying to show her I was on her side. Ultimately they all came along, agreeing that Stamper was on the right track. And that’s how we agreed on the first steps: we would discard the long-form training that was designed to solve all of a company’s problems in a certain subject area, and in its place we would construct tiny building blocks of content, with each block focused on a specific, measurable behavior that we wanted to change. We agreed that we could define the parameters of this work and get a team working on it.
The politics and permissions of it all? Well that was up to me and to Nels.
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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.