Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

To provide a system for users, we need to know the users. How can we know the users without being a user and forgetting about the providers?

I once worked a couple of years in an American Embassy in Africa. A constant concern at the U.S. Department of State was that its employees would “go native.” The worry was that the employees would live in Africa long enough that they would identify more with the Africans than with the State Department back in Washington.

But wasn’t that the point? That they would understand the Africans? Not exactly, and that is the tension.

The job of the U.S. employees in Africa is to represent American foreign policy to the Africans. The better they know the Africans, the better they can help the foreign policy makers in Washington state their case in a way that the Africans understand and appreciate. If, however, the Americans in Africa become “too close” to the Africans, they start to love the Africans and hate Washington. At this point, they fail to do their job.

The same tension occurs with system developers and the eventual system users. To build a system that people will use and love, the developers should know something about the users. Ah, simple, live with the users for a while. Live with the users too long, however, and the developer comes to love the users and hate the other developers.

Sigh.

What to do? How do you have one of your own live with the other side, yet keep them from turning into the other side?

The ideal answer is to not have “sides” of “us” and “them.” The ideal answer is to have one big happy family where we are all in one group striving for one solution. I have never seen the ideal answer in practice. I have seen several attempts at it, but the managers one or two levels up the chain always pulled back to the “us and them” model with the inherent danger of “going native.”

I think the root problem is ego. Someone wants to “get ahead” of someone else. They way to do that is to keep the us and them going. If I am ahead of you, I have created a split comprising “me and you” and “us and them.”

Sigh, again.

I encourage people to attempt the ideal answer. Maybe someone will find a way for it to work some day in some place. Please let me know.