The Magician's Curse

Technical staff build and manage systems that, to those who don't know the trick, look like magic. When something goes wrong we often appear and resolve the issue, accompanied by some well practiced patter, and then vanish until we're next summoned.

This illusion creates a problem though. If the crowd are free to choose any trick they can think of for the magician to perform, and they truly believe in the magic, it's not going to be that long before the magician is asked to actually saw someone in half and put them back together.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

- Arthur C. Clarke

"That's ridiculous" you might think, "we'd never ask a magician to really saw someone in half!". You're right, you probably wouldn't, but that's because you know it's a trick. Behind all of the showmanship, the well-practiced patter, the fancy out fist and the incomprehensible language, you know that the magician needs to have their routine prepared. They need to have practiced their art, to have the equipment ready, and to have carried out their routine in a specific order so that everyone is in the right place when the big reveal is made.

No matter how much it might look like magic, technology is not magic, it's technology.

Translate this analogy to the techies working to build you what you need. You know that your current problem could be solved by technology, and it would really help things if you could have your solution ready by the start of the year so that you can introduce it to everyone on the first training day, and have staff and students using it straight away. That leaves three weeks for your techies to work their magic, this should be fine, right?

Maybe...

Maybe it is fine, maybe this is a trick that your techies know already, or one that they've practiced before. Maybe they've not done something exactly like this before, but they've done something similar. They've definitely pulled something from a hat before...

... or maybe not.

Maybe it's a much tougher task to carry out than it looks when you see someone do it. Maybe it's possible, but only with some equipment that we don't have. Perhaps it's possible to achieve with an accomplice, but the accomplice is on holiday for the next two weeks and won't be able to practice enough before the show. Possibly, you could do it, but you'd have to stop preparing for the other show that's already planned You know, the big one? In the 50,000 seat arena?

At this point I fear that my analogy has run away with me! In all seriousness though, this is roughly what it's like to sit in the technical side of the fence. Of course, most people don't see our day-to-day work, so it's to be expected that there's sometimes a gap between what's asked and what's possible. I'll be writing more on that in the future, but for now, I want to lay out some initial actions we can all take to try and alleviate this problem.

For the education & business teams...

• Start talking about what you need early.

• Involve your techies in the design, tell them the problem you're trying to solve and listen to what they have to say.

• Be open to the suggestion that the solution might not be purely technical - It's likely you'll need to work with your techies to make sure that you get something that works.

• Understand that other projects might have to slide, and that might then mean you need to make further difficult choices.

• Ask what they need from you in order to have things ready and then make that your priority.

For the technical teams...

• Do your best to understand the problem you're trying to solve.

• Check your assumptions. Don't assume that a request for a "card trick" means that you have to have the selected card appear in a giant magical fireball.

• Ask about specifics. Does the card have to be the Ace of Clubs, or was that just plucked out as an example?

• Be clear about what you need, and what risks there are to the project.

• Understand how this request fits in to the rest of the show. What other links might be important?

It's my view that every organisation must have IT as a core competency in order to succeed, but this goes far beyond having a very good "magician". Technology offers us an incredible set of tools, and with them we can build wonders; but we have to understand one another or we'll never be able to put on a proper show.