Thing One: Apparently, growing numbers of localities, spurred largely by concerns over injury and liability, are banning schoolchildren from playing the game of tag.
Thing Two: In at least two reported cases, drivers, confronted with variance between what their eyes (and, one hopes, their brains) told them and what their on-board Global Positioning System (GPS) widget told them, opted to believe the widget. One drove directly into a large pile of sand.
Thing Three: The new video game "Bully" was railed against for more than a year before it actually became available, decried as everything from a "negative influence" on children to a "Columbine simulator," referring to the tragic massacre in Colorado in 1999. This about a video game which, it turns out, contains numerous on-screen fistfights, but no blood, death, weapons, or sex. This makes the "T"-for-teens-rated game tamer than, oh, say, almost anything on broadcast television (let alone on paid TV services or the Web), from sitcoms to the news. By the way, the hand-wringers who decried the game had not seen it before its recent release. Nonetheless, efforts to ban the game in outside the U.S. got at least one UK retailer to pull it -- even though the chain will continue to sell games in the "Grand Theft Auto" series, from the same folks who developed "Bully". That M-for-mature-rated series features opportunities for players to act as criminals that shoot at and kill numerous other characters, including police.
What does all of this mean? I have no idea. But I'm pretty sure it helps to explain why so many bad IT decisions get made, and why so many get made badly. And maybe why the same dynamics often apply to life beyond IT and the enterprise.
It is incredibly difficult to strive to achieve and demonstrate leadership or innovation, let alone daring, in a culture that would rather have their obese, unhealthy children likely to turn into prematurely dead adults than to risk a skinned elbow or knee. (Or perhaps they're afraid that if their young one causes another to injure themselves, that other will show up in school the next day armed to the teeth -- but that's another, far more thorny set of issues.)
Nonetheless, to make IT in the enterprise -- or childhood, or traveling unknown roads, or, really, almost anything -- all it can be often requires daring, innovation, and leadership. Despite the currently prevailing cultural winds or societal predispositions. And despite those often unshakable companions of the new and different, "fear, uncertainty, and doubt," or "FUD."
The only effective defense against darkness is light, and the only effective defense against FUD is undeniable fact, something with which FUD typically has only a glancing relationship, if any. (This is why Stephen Colbert, in character as host of his wonderfully chilling show "The Colbert Report," once said he wasn't "a big fan of facts," putting more stock in "truthiness," or that which sounded most like what he wanted to believe.)
Hands-on experience. Anecdotal evidence from reliable sources. The opinions of credible others. Basic research. Those are the things that get past FUD, and get to where things happen. Sometimes, a surprisingly high percentage of these things turn out to be good.
Identify opportunities to try something that look like they might deliver benefit and/or value. Then do them, learn from what happens, refine your approach, and start again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If you're making or affecting IT decisions, you could become a hero. If you're doing anything else, it might be interesting, too.
