I had planned to write about Mercedes-Benz’s announcement of a new MBUX Collectibles in-car app, which allows drivers to showcase their non-fungible token (NFT) collection on dashboards at the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
I have a long-running interest in how cars, and transportation in general, often act as a conduit for technological changes that impact our lives in a small, day-to-day way — often going unnoticed — while we quake with fear from the anticipation of large-scale, hype-filled developments like the imminent arrival of our future sentient robot overlords.
However, I can’t stop thinking about failure.
A few years ago, a friend sat down with me at an industry event to vent about a new manager that was causing havoc in her department. Not only were their leadership skills lacking, but many in the team doubted that this person had knowledge deep enough to run this part of the bank business.
It’s not that insightful a story. Work for any length of time and you will encounter co-workers or leaders who are difficult to work with or just not very competent in their jobs, at least once or twice.
One of the issues my friend was dealing with, despite an almost universal opinion that this manager was not fit for purpose, was that nothing would be done to rectify the situation. The manager was appointed by a very senior person at the bank, and to reassign, retrain or even admit there was a problem with the individual, would reflect as a failure. I am sure many of you can guess, the admission of failure by a ‘very senior person’ isn’t always forthcoming.
Attend any conference or event aimed at start-ups and you will find someone talking about the importance of failure. Specifically, allowing for it to be a part of the innovation process and not penalising individuals for it.
Despite the hype NFTs enjoyed a couple of years ago, where a handful of people made a fair amount of money selling tokens derived from old memes and ancient tweets, today, they are considered something of a joke, a failure. If so, why would Mercedes-Benz enable NFTs in their cars? The reason can’t only be to secure press coverage at CES. Is there something about the culture of decentralised offerings that sees failures as learning curves to move on from, rather than things to ignore, deny and bury?
All these musings about failure popped back into my head over the weekend when I finally sat down to watch the UK ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which I mentioned last week.
At the heart of what happened at the Post Office was an IT failure. The system, Horizon, was developed and maintained by Fujitsu and used as a sales terminal. Many branches complained of accounts not balancing, as well as shortfalls and, on-occasion, surpluses. Connectivity issues added to difficulties, and glitches altered accounting records and created duplicate transactions.
A rational human being should conclude that something as non-political as a computer bug could be easily identified and fixed. However, Horizon was a massive, networked accounting service that cost millions of pounds. Admitting that it wasn’t working as it should was something that the cultures of the UK government, the Post Office and Fujitsu wouldn’t allow.
Ultimately, it was that culture that caused an IT system failure, which could have been identified, contained and rectified 24 years ago, to explode into one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British legal history.
However, the realisation that culture sits down to a full breakfast of IT strategy, buzzy technology and good intentions every day is easy. Making a change to that culture — especially when you work at a centuries-old, multi-business global bank is much harder.
(I’m not done with the UK Post Office yet! Next month I sit down with Andra Sonea in the Functional Banking Magic podcast studio to examine the impossible role Post Office branches are forced into as incumbent banks close their physical branches and abandon the high street.)
You can connect with Liz on LinkedIn, or follow her on Bluesky.
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