One day last week, my son Dan, a freshman at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, went skiing with Adam, his best friend and a WPI floormate who happens to be an avid skier. Dan had two things working against him that day. First, he had never before seen snow skis in real life. Second, he gets his athletic prowess from me.
Consequently, as Adam swooshed gracefully down the slopes of Wachusett Mountain, Dan spent a good part of the time looking up at his skis and admiring their perpendicularity.
Toward the end of the day, Adam asked Dan what time it was. When Dan looked at his wrist, his heart sank. Gone was the watch he'd received as a high school graduation gift. It had obviously been torn off in the course of one of the innumerable falls he had taken during 10 runs on four trails.
Adam could see that the watch meant a lot to Dan, so without missing a beat, he set out to find it. That's right. He decided to go look for a silver watch that had been lost somewhere on a snow-covered mountain.
He took the lift to the summit and slowly slalomed down the last trail Dan had taken, searching intently for the watch. He didn't find it.
So Adam got on the lift again. On the way back up, he glanced down at a different trail, and he spotted something silver gleaming in the snow. "That's it," he thought. Once off the lift, he skied anxiously down toward the silver speck. When he reached it, he pulled it out of the snow. And there in his hand was a foil gum wrapper.
Adam's head dropped. And when it did, his eye caught something even tinier in the snow, about a foot away from where the gum wrapper had been. He reached down and pulled Dan's buried watch out of the snow. (Yes, it was still ticking.)
I learned something when Dan told me that story, and I wanted to share it. I have to admit that if it had been me, the idea of looking for the watch would have been a nonstarter. I would have dismissed it out of hand as hopelessly futile and suggested that we get some hot chocolate as consolation and call it a day.
So yeah, Dan had two things working against him that day. But he had at least one thing going for him: He had a really good friend who refused to acquiesce to the notion of futility.
That refusal serves as a remarkable lesson for all of us, and it occurs to me that nowhere is it more valuable than in the IT profession. I've been a witness to the work you do long enough to know that much of what you're called upon to accomplish has such a high degree of difficulty that the prospect of a successful outcome must at times seem entirely unrealistic. And at times I've witnessed personal and organizational paralysis as a result. It's not a pretty sight.
No one is advocating recklessness. But there's a lot to be said for an organizational culture that values and rewards a willingness to try things even when the probability of success seems minuscule.
So if somebody on your team comes to you for a thumbs-up to try something that your gut tells you is a waste of time, think twice before you shoot him down. You just never know what lies a foot away from failure.