You’ve heard of the term “plausible deniability“? The concept is political, not technical. It relates to how intelligence agencies, corporations, big business and “the board” have to “act.” Serious people buy “risk containment,” not “innovation. You cannot sell them prototypes. That word; “prototype,” carries a kernel of visible failure and a lack of control.
A hard word hard to fit in a quarterly report with someone’s name attached, but so are “scaled,” “dynamic” and “agile,” all getting transmogrified into “processes.” Your technical people are far more comfortable with the impermanence of machines. They know all products have lifecycles and fail in strange ways, so you “bodge a fix,” until your guys can think about it. They are grounded in objective reality and, usually, their job title doesn’t bold, emboss, all Caps: “Omnipotent. ”
There is a linguistic grapheme that “plausibility” retains. It addresses an active political need for mutability, reversibility, opting out and switching horses in secret. Terms like “contained deployment,” “evaluation windows,” “non-binding architecture” and “sunset clause” may sound like word salad, but they frame the concept; can we back out without losing credibility?
The quiet truth is that many “permanent systems” only exist because a temporary one became politically *inconvenient to remove (*no viable replacement, the departure of the one person who knew the login, key customers use the “legacy” tool). That is how infrastructure is often born. Not from chess grandmaster level strategy, but due to embarrassment, usage patterns and sunken costs. Take a look at Manchester United football Club for the last 10 years or IBM Lotus Notes.
Once a reality exists the power structure flips from the complex; “should we do this?” to the far easier vector; “who owns this?” This is why you see a hard push for accountability, reliability and punctuality in disposable scrum masters, product owners, project managers and team leads, but not in the higher ups – where one judgement-bad call means you’ve “lost it,” and that promised corner office too. Conversely, when decision making goes to committee it’s hard to get fired ( a lesson Steve Jobs never learned), but the lemons tend to pile up.
The point of the last five paragraphs was to get to this level of abstraction. By this, I mean an understanding of prototyping, not as a technical exercise, but as a physical artefact to show to “the board.” As long as you can demo something (anything) they are being socially engineered to accept a working “solution.”This is just mechanics. It is not machiavellian, it is systems literacy. Proof beats “strategy” every time, because their entire game is certainty. A temporary (working) system is a political technology.
At the level we are discussing, tech is not a tool, it is a structural. Power lies inside those overtly technical, … but intensely political decisions; who can act, who must act, who can repair, who must pay, who can exit, who is trapped? We addressed similar power politics in a recent procurement post. It is why innovation grinds to a halt the more you outsource. It is why banks fund a lot of start-ups at once. It’s why “big” organizations collapse internally, first. It is why decision makers in major companies use “golden parachutes” to cushion that fall back to earth. It is why elephants really can’t dance, even if they trumpet it from the ramparts.
