Beyond Blame

Chapter 12. Paradigm Shift

“You seem preoccupied,” Linda said. She was sitting at a small table across from Roger in his office during their weekly check-in meeting. Behind Roger, a large, square window that could not be opened, framed a dreary, darkening sky.

“I’m getting a lot of pressure from the E.C.,” he said. “They want assurance that we’re not going to have any more trading outages.”

“That’s not possible,” Linda said.

Roger shrugged.

“OK, well, do you have time for a few things related to this?” Linda said.

“All good things, surely,” Roger said.

“So, Bill and Ollie and I, we’ve all been speaking a lot about outages, and what we can do about them. We actually don’t know how risky our current situation is.”

“Oh, dear lord, what do you mean?”

“We’ve got a lot of interdependent, interconnected systems. Very complex. It’s hard to predict exactly how they might work or fail.”

“Don’t we have enough experts?”

“We have plenty of experts, but they’re not working together much. And they’re not focused on the whole system—only their own parts. Like, did you notice how Raj behaved when we talked about the last outage?”

“Nothing unusual. Raj was being Raj.”

“He was relieved to not be in the hot seat. We were all relieved to not be Bill that afternoon. We all thought that maybe our teams were different than Bill’s, that maybe such things couldn’t happen to us. But the problem is that we need Raj’s software to work, and Bill’s networks, and Ollie’s servers. If they don’t work, the firm ...