A Technology Architect’s Guide to Humans, Part One: Humans are Human

It doesn’t take long working as a technology architect to realise that technology is easy, but humans are hard. Today’s technology is complex, can be difficult to understand, and changes at an ever increasing rate. But technology behaves in predictable ways, even when it fails. As you long as you understand it at a sufficiently fundamental level, technology does what you tell it to.

By contract, humans are less predictable, and less inclined to do what you ask them to do. They ask questions, they raise objections, they suffer fear, uncertainty and doubt. They need to be emotionally committed as well as rationally persuaded before they apply all their energy. They misunderstand and they forget. But when they are persuaded and committed, they bring imagination, passion and creativity that no machine can match.

If you are a technology architect, you probably work with humans every day. Your family and friends are likely to be humans and, unless there have been unexpected advances in AI since I wrote this blog post, you are probably a human too. Yet, if you’re anything like me, I expect that you feel that you still haven’t figured these humans out yet.

It’s taken me a long while to learn some basic lessons about working with humans as a technology architect, often through some painful mistakes. I thought it might be helpful to share some of these lessons as occasional blog posts. I still manage to forget these lessons on a daily basis, so this is also an aide memoire for me.

Lesson 1: Humans are Human

The idea that humans are human might seem obvious to the point of tautology, but it is a truth which we often seem to ignore, especially in a world increasingly dominated by electronic communication.

What I mean when I say that humans are humans is that every person has their own life, their own hopes and disappointments, their own priorities and frustrations. They have their own human needs, whether those are as profound as a need for meaning and purpose, or as banal as the need for another cup of coffee after a long boring meeting.

As technology architects, we often forget this truth. Whether we are working on an enterprise wide technology strategy or the design of a feature within an application, we tend to be convinced of our own rightness, and expect others to fall in line with that conviction. We forget that humans aren’t like that: we can’t define a file format for belief and understanding, and can’t get people to parse that file and change their brains. We have to explain, persuade and convince. We have to listen, and may even have to admit that we are wrong.

However, we don’t just need to remember that humans are human when we are proposing strategies, architectures or designs: we also need to remember it in our normal, day to day interaction. We seem particularly prone to forget this truth when the other humans we are dealing with are abstracted from us: when they are on the other side of an instant message, an email or, even worse, a support ticket or an obscure business process. We are still early in the process of figuring out how electronic communication and social media affect human interaction, but the signs aren’t good: it seems that many people feel that they can behave badly to others when they are separated by glass screens, and that this is at least partly because they forget that those others are human.

The best expression of this idea which I have heard comes from James Brookbank in our Cloud architecture team. I recently heard James give a presentation on ‘blockers’: the obstacles that we perceive get in the way of getting things done. Many of us, particularly those of us in leadership positions (including me), like to speak in a very macho way about blockers: we say that part of our job is to remove blockers, to blow them up, to blast them out of the road and so on. James’ point was that, while it is fine to be impatient and to want to move faster, something we perceive as a ‘blocker’ is often a human trying to do their job. And the job they are trying to do is something that we have asked them to do. Treating them merely as an obstacle to be removed is to forget that they are human. It also denies the opportunity for them to do what humans do best, and to make a unique human contribution to solving the problem we are trying to solve.

The lesson that humans are human may seem obvious, but the world conspires to help us forget it every day. Technology architects should remember that humans are human, that they need to communicate their ideas in terms which humans understand, to set out goals in ways that humans respond to, and to treat their fellow humans with respect, especially when they are separated by time, distance and screens.