The Power of Understanding Why

It was a typical Saturday morning for me. I had just finished exercising and was getting ready for the day when my son came into my bathroom and said ‘Dad, my computer’s broken.’  I’m the CIO of an international company ensuring that people around the globe get the right medications on time – every time. Visions of coffee mugs and t-shirts touting ‘No – I won’t fix your computer’ or ‘Stay calm – I am an IT Director’ flashed in my head and for a brief moment I was frustrated, but this was my son and as with my team at work I needed to put my personal interests aside to help fix an ‘IT’ problem.

So down I went into my son’s ‘lair’ to be confronted by an ominous warning from his computer stating that it could not find the boot drive. My son, a teenager, and typical of the ‘tech savvy’ younger generation did what he was supposed to … reboot. Unfortunately this did not fix the problem.

Giant ‘S’ on my chest and cape waving in the wind I saddled up to his computer … and paused. I thought for a moment as both dad and CIO of the Hoffmann household – what is best? Would it be best to solve this mystery and fly off to a new adventure or would it be best to try to teach my son how to fix this issue on his own. The answer was obvious.

I asked my son to explain what the error message he was receiving meant and like many students he simply restated the error presented by Microsoft. It was factual but not really helpful in figuring out what was wrong so I asked questions. The first thing I asked was what the error message referred to when ‘booting’ up the system. I wanted to know if my son understood what this meant.

Much to my amazement – he did! He knew that the boot process was loading the operating system from ‘somewhere’ into memory. (Side note, we had a brief discussion about the difference between RAM and ROM … but hey I started off as an EE/Computer Engineer, so forgive me my trespasses.) So then I asked him to analyze what the error actually meant. This is where I needed to coach him a little after all he was expecting help not an exam. But in an incredibly short time he came to his own conclusion that the computer simply couldn’t find the operating system.

At that point the light bulb went off in his head – a proud moment for any manager, leader, or parent. But he didn’t know what to do next. As a mentor, coach and teacher I took my cape off and removed the ‘S’ from my chest. I pushed my chair back and asked my son ‘to drive.’ He rebooted the computer and I showed him how to get into the BIOS settings From there I showed him the order of precedence the hardware was using to boot up the operating system software. On his own he could see the system was somehow trying to load from the DVD instead of the SATA hard drive. Together we walked through how to change the priority of boot sources so that the system would work. In the end, the system worked.   A simple Microsoft update had changed the priority of boot drives and we were able to get his computer running.

Applied Knowledge Is Power

After his computer restarted successfully we discussed what we discovered. He explained the operating system and the boot order from the BIOS – Greek to most and really unimportant here – but most importantly he explained why the steps we took fixed the problem. As the head of Hoffmann IT I could not have felt prouder.

As an IT leader we often overlook the magic and mystery of IT. Many of us leaders were born in the era when computers didn’t exist in the mainstream. As a result we forget the primal knowledge we have regarding how these electronic beasts think. Our kids are so savvy about getting connected we forget that they may not understand the simple basics of the protocol behind the communications. That brief moment with my son was not unlike the daily interactions with my team. Together we learned the science – the why – behind what we were doing and because of this we were able to solve the problem.

My son did (and my employees do) the problem solving. My role was and is to coach, mentor and lead so that others can find the solution. The moral of the story goes back to biblical scriptures …If you give a man a fish you feed him for the day, but if you teach him how to fish you feed him for life. We as IT leaders are not the most successful as fishermen (there are only so many fish we alone can catch) – we are most successful when we teach people how to fish. This does not mean we need to reveal our ‘secrets’ to our business partners. Quite frankly – they don’t care. But I am suggesting that as IT leaders we need to develop our teams and subordinates to pass along our knowledge.