It happens every year like clockwork. A certain site is made live, and runs for somewhere between 2 and 24 hours before…uh oh, there’s a problem. This group needs access, this group changed their mind and no longer wants it, schedules are wrong, schedules don’t exist. On and on, a pick ’n sort of the same ten issues repeating themselves each cycle. And dutifully, each and every time, the amazing tech staff fix those issues.

After that the game begins. “We have this problem every year.” “How do we prevent this?” And, of course, “How did the technology let us down?”

Which is usually immediately followed by “IT needs to write a process so this never happens again.”

Every. Year.

Here’s the secret folks. It’s one I’ve been getting more and more vocal about lately when faced by issues like this.

You can’t use technology to fix a people problem.

Once more, as a quote.

You can’t use technology to fix a people problem!

– Me, but really someone I heard it from in the past

If a person says yes to every request regardless of the effort, deadlines, agreed upon scope, or processes in place, no amount of technology can fix that. Slow it down, make it more visible, sure, but fix it? Nope.

If a person is told by their supervisors that they should make a decision; does so; it goes wrong; and leadership chops the decision-maker up and feeds them to the wolves, guess what? There is no magic software that will ever allow that person to feel comfortable with making a decision ever again.

What if those same leaders then never respond to emails, constantly avoid hard calls, and vacillate wildly between all of the options during a development (or any) process? Progress halts. People get confused. Everyone fills the gaps with their own opinion. And yet again, there no quick fix that technology can provide. If anything, you’ll end up with those wolves.

I have to imagine you see both the theme and my point by now. The theme is, the culture at my company sucks. The very definition of toxic.

My point is different, but related to that theme very closely. Ultimately, it is this - you have to work with your people, understand their work, create processes to support it, empower them as employees and humans, and lead by example. There is no software package, dataset, workflow, dashboard, or line of code that will ever be an easy fix for that core tenet.

What’s frustrating is, everyone reading right now is rolling their eyes. The above is the oldest, most overused, straight up boring leadership line in existence. Yawn.

And yet, every single day, I go in to work and see the absolute antithesis of that run-on sentence. The very opposite. Oh, it gets talked about, and some even have grand delusions that they are uber-leaders, but actually seeing it in action? It has never happened there.

Well, that’s not true. We have had a few instances. Most recently a CTO that tried to embody those values, and got pretty far. They certainly gained the respect and loyalty of almost the entirety of their own staff, and established multiple human-centered processes that were starting to bear fruit. Ah, but remember example two above?

Yeah, that was the end of them. The wolves were well fed this year.

The replacement? Someone who has promised that “quick fix.” They are investing countless hours into AI everything, workflows, processes, dashboards on every surface, and vibecoding because this, this landfill of technology solutions for sure will fix all of our problems. And they invest not a single minute of their time in their staff, unless forced to by a superior’s questions or an emergent issue.

I understand some of it. Leading a batch of humans is difficult, and can get quite… icky. AI and tech is fun, is cool, is flashy and showy, is happenin’. Technology also allows poor leaders to avoid hard conversations, to hide behind the (usually incorrect, ask me how I know) numbers on their dashboards.

Technology also helps to strip away leaders humanity. If they aren’t regularly problem solving and interacting with their real staff (i.e. not their peers), everyone becomes a “resource,” or an “FTE,” instead of a real human that needs guidance. You can cover up some pretty cruel behavior and decisions if it is just affecting a “resource” instead of a human being.

To pile on, technology has most leaders obsessed with velocity. Everything now must be done faster, must be technology- or data-driven, sometimes with unrealistic deadlines because we can just throw more technology or “FTE” at it. The result, again, is humans get left behind and unsupported.

On the flip side, I am lucky enough to have cultivated a good reputation amongst my peers and coworkers. They see me as someone to visit to help solve their problems, point them in the right direction, or just listen to them vent. I just ran into someone today who found out I moved my desk and they said “Good, now I know where to go when I have something that needs to get done.”

I have no secrets to share on how I’ve managed this. I’ve simply tried to be a good person, assumed others have good intent (until shown otherwise), and listened a ton more than I have talked.

If I had a message for leaders, it would be - slow the fuck down, listen, think for 5 minutes before you act or speak, put the people and the work above your ego, and understand the data you are basing your decisions on. You don’t have all the answers, but you and your people collectively can solve the problems.

That’s something your fancy AI-enabled technology platform can’t do.