Monthly Archives: September 2022

Intelligence and Wisdom

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I spent the last week at the Philmont Leadership Challenge in beautiful Cimarron, NM. I had the chance to learn a bit more about servant leadership and work on my outdoor skills a little. I also had some time to reflect on an interesting question posed to me by one of the members of my crew.

He asked me, “You seem wise. How did you get so wise?” This caught me flat-flooted for a moment because I’d never really considered myself to be a very wise person. Experienced perhaps but not wise like Yoda or Gandalf. So I answered him as I thought more about it.

Intelligence is knowing what to do. Wisdom is knowing what not to do.

The more I thought about that quote the more I realized the importance of the distinction.

Basic Botany

There’s another saying that people tweeted back at me when I shared the above quote. It’s used in the context of describing Intelligence and Wisdom for Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying:

Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting tomatoes in a fruit salad.

It’s silly and funny but it gets right to the point and is a different version of my other observation. Intelligence is all about the acquisition of knowledge. Think about your certification journey. You spend all your time learning the correct commands for displaying routing tables or how to debug a device and figure out what’s going on. You memorize arguments so you can pass the exam without the use of the question mark.

Intelligence is focused on making sure you have all the knowledge you can ever use. Whether it’s an arcane spell book or Routing TCP/IP Volume 1 you’re working with the kinds of information that you need to ingest in order to get things done. Think of it like a kind of race to amass a fortune in facts.

However, as pointed out above, intelligence is often lacking in the application of that knowledge. Assembling a storehouse full of facts doesn’t do much to help you when it comes to applying that knowledge to produce outcomes. You can be a very intelligent person and still not know what to do with it. You may have heard someone say that a person is “book smart” or is lacking is “common sense”. These are both ways to say that someone is intelligent by maybe not wise.

Applied Science

If intelligence is all about acquisition of knowledge then wisdom is focused on application. Just because you know what commands are used to debug a router doesn’t mean you need to use them all the time. There are apocryphal stories of freshly minted CCIEs walking in to the data center for an ISP and entering debug ip packet detail on the CLI only to watch the switch completely exhaust itself and crash in the middle of the day. The command was correct for what they wanted to accomplish. What was missing was the applied knowledge that a busy switch wouldn’t be able to handle the additional processing load of that much data being streamed to the console.

Wisdom isn’t gained from reading a book. It’s gained from applying knowledge to situations. No application of that knowledge is going to be perfect every time. You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to do things that cause problems. You’re going to need to fix mistakes and learn as you go. Along the way you’re going to find a lot of things that don’t work for a given situation. That’s where wisdom is gained. You’re not failing. You’re learning what doesn’t work so you don’t apply it incorrectly.

A perfect example of this came just a couple of days ago. The power in my office was out which meant the Internet was down for everyone. A major crisis for sure! I knew I needed to figure out what was going on so I started the troubleshooting process. I knew how electricity worked and what needed to be checked. Along the way I kept working and trying to figure out where the problem was. The wisdom I gained along the way from working with series circuits and receptacles helped me narrow things down to one wall socket that had become worn out and needed to be replaced. More wisdom told me to make sure the power was turned off before I started working on the replacement.

I succeeded not because I knew what to do as much as knowing what not to do when applying the knowledge. I didn’t have to check plugs I knew weren’t working. I knew things could be on different circuits. I knew I didn’t have to mess with working sockets either. All the knowledge of resistance and current would only serve me correctly if I knew where to put it and how to work around the issues I saw in the application of that knowledge.

Not every piece of wisdom comes from unexpected outcomes. It’s often just as important to do something that works and see the result so you can remember it for the next time. The wisdom comes in knowing how to apply that knowledge and why it only works in certain situations. If you’ve every worked with someone that troubleshoots really complex problems with statements like “I tried this crazy thing once and it worked” you know exactly how this can be done.

Tom’s Take

Intelligence has always been my strong point. I read a lot and retain knowledge. I’m at home when I’m recalling trivia or absorbing new facts. However I’ve always worried that I wasn’t very wise. I make simple mistakes and often forget how to use the information I have on hand. However, when I shared the quote above I finally realized that all those mistakes were just me learning how to apply the knowledge I’d gained over time. Wisdom isn’t a passage in a book. It’s not a fact. It’s about knowing when to use it and when not to use it. It’s about learning in a different way that matters just as much as all the libraries in the world.

Redundancy Is Not Resiliency

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Most people carry a spare tire in their car. It’s there in case you get a flat and need to change the tire before you can be on your way again. In my old VAR job I drove a lot away from home and to the middle of nowhere so I didn’t want to rely on roadside assistance. Instead I just grabbed the extra tire out of the back if I needed it and went on my way. However, the process wasn’t entirely hitless. Even the pit crew for a racing team needs time to change tires. I could probably get it done in 20 minutes with appropriate cursing but those were 20 minutes that I wasn’t doing anything else beyond fixing a tire.

Spare tires are redundant. You have an extra thing to replace something that isn’t working. IT operations teams are familiar with redundant systems. Maybe you have a cold spare on the shelf for a switch that might go down. You might have a cold or warm data center location for a disaster. You could even have redundant devices in your enterprise to help you get back in to your equipment if something causes it to go offline. Well, I say that you do. If you’re Meta/Facebook you didn’t have them this time last year.

Don’t mistake redundancy for resilience though. Like the tire analogy above you’re not going to be able to fix a flat while you’re driving. Yes, I’ve seen the crazy video online of people doing that but aside from stunt driving you’re going to have to take some downtime from your travel to fix the tire. Likewise, a redundant setup that includes cold spares or out-of-band devices that are connected directly to your network could incur downtime if they go offline and lock you out of your management system. Facebook probably thought their out-of-band control system worked just fine. Until it didn’t.

The Right Gear for Resilience

At Networking Field Day 29 last week we were fortunate to see Opengear present again for the second time. I’m familiar with them from all the way back at Networking Field Day 2 in 2011 so their journey through the changes of networking over the past decade has been great to see. They make out-of-band devices and they make them well. They’re one of the companies that immediately spring to mind when you think about solutions for getting access to devices outside the normal network access method.

As a VAR there were times that I needed to make calls to locations in order to reboot devices or get console access to fix an issue. Whether it was driving 3 hours to press F1 to clear a failed power supply message or racing across town to restore phone service after locking myself out of an SSH session there are numerous reasons why having actual physical access to the console is important. Until we perfect quantum teleportation we’re going to have to solve that problem with technology. Here’s a video from the Networking Field Day session that highlights some of the challenges and solutions that Opengear has available:

Ryan Hogg brings up a great argument here for redundancy versus resiliency. Are you managing your devices in-band? Or do you have a dedicated management network? And what’s your backup for that dedicated network if something goes offline? VLAN separation isn’t good enough. In the event of a failure mode, such as a bridging loop or another attack that takes a switch offline you won’t be able to access the management network if you can’t sent packets through it. If the tire goes flat you’re stopped until it’s fixed.

Opengear solves this problem in a number of ways. The first is of course providing a secondary access method to your network. Opengear console devices have a cellular backup function that can allow you to access them in the event of an outage, either from the internal network or from the Internet going down. I can think of a couple of times in my career where I would have loved to have been able to connect to a cellular interface to undo a change that just happened that had unintended consequences. Sometimes reload in 5 doesn’t quite do the job. Having a reliable way to connect to your core equipment makes life easy for network operating systems that don’t keep from making mistakes.

However, as mentioned, redundancy is not resiliency. It’s not enough for us to have access to fix the problem while everything is down and the world is on fire. We may be able to get back in and fix the issue without needing to drive to the site but the users in that location are still down while we’re working. SD-WAN devices have offered us diverse connectivity options for a number of years now. If the main broadband line goes down just fail back to the cellular connection for critical traffic until it comes back up. Easy to do now that we have the proper equipment to create circuit diversity.

As outlined in the video above, Opengear has the same capability as well. If you don’t have a fancy SD-WAN edge device you can still configure Opengear console devices to act as a secondary egress point. It’s as simple as configuring the network with an IP SLA to track the state of the WAN link and installing the cellular route in the routing table if that link goes down. Once configured your users can get out on the backup link while you’re coming in to fix whatever caused the issue. If it’s the ISP having the issue you can log a ticket and confirm things are working on-site without having to jump in a car to see what your users see.

Resilience Really Matters

One of the things that Opengear has always impressed me with is their litany of use cases for their devices. I can already think of a ton of ways that I could implement something like this for customers that need monitoring and resilient connectivity options. Remote offices are an obvious choice but so too are locations with terrible connectivity options.

If you are working in a location with spotty connectivity you can easily deploy an Opengear device to keep an eye on the network and/or servers as well as providing an extra way for the site to get back online in the event of an issue. If the WAN circuit goes down you can just hop over to the cellular link until you get it fixed. Opengear will tell you something happened and you can log into the Lighthouse central management system to go there and collect data. If configured correctly your users may not even realize they’re offline! We’re almost at the point of changing the tire while we’re driving.

Tom’s Take

I am often asked if I miss working on networking equipment since I rarely touch it these days. As soon as I’m compelled to answer that question I remember all the times I had to drive somewhere to fix an issue. Wasted time can never be recovered. Resources cost money whether it’s money for a device or time spent going to fix one. I look at the capabilities that a company like Opengear has today and I wish I had those fifteen years ago and could deploy them to places I know needed them. In my former line of work redundant things were hard to come by. Resilient options were much more appealing because they offered more than just a back plan in case of failure. You need to pick resiliency every time because otherwise you’re going to be losing time replacing that tire when you could be rolling along fixing it instead.

Disclaimer

Opengear was a presenter at Networking Field Day 29 on September 7, 2022. I am an employee of Tech Field Day, which is the company that managed the event. This blog post represents my own personal thoughts about the presentation and is not the opinion of Tech Field Day. Opengear did not provide compensation for this post or ask for editorial approval. This post is my perspective alone.

Brand Protection

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I woke up at 5am this morning to order a new iPhone. I did this because I wanted the new camera upgrades along with some other nice-to-haves. Why did I get an iPhone and not a new Samsung? Why didn’t I look at any of the other phones on the market? It’s because I am a loyal Apple customer at this point. Does that mean I think the iPhone is perfect? Far from it! But I will choose it in spite of the flaws because I know it has room to be better.

That whole story is repeated time and again in technology. People find themselves drawn to particular companies or brands. They pick a new phone or computer or car based on their familiarity with the way they work or the design choices that are made. But does that mean they have to be loyal to that company no matter what?

Agree to Disagree

One of the things that I feel is absolutely paramount to being a trusted advisor in the technology space is the ability to be critical of a product or brand. If you look at a lot of the ambassador or influencer program agreements you’ll see language nestled toward the bottom of the legalese. That language usually states you are not allowed to criticize the brand for their decisions or talk about them in a disparaging way. In theory the idea is important because it prevents people from signing up for the program and then using the platform to harshly and unfairly criticize the company.

However, the dark side of those agreements usually outweigh the benefits. The first issue is that companies will wield the power to silence you to great effect. The worst offenders will have you removed from the program and potentially even sue you. Samsung almost stranded bloggers 10 years ago because of some brand issues. At the time it seemed crazy that a brand would do that. Today it doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched.

The second issue is that those agreements are written in such a way as to be able to cause issues for you even if you didn’t realize you were doing something you weren’t supposed to be doing. Think about celebrities that have tweeted about a new Android phone and the tweet has metadata that says sent with Twitter for iPhone. How about companies that get very upset when you discuss companies that they see as competitors. Even if you don’t see them as competitors or don’t see the issue with it you may find yourself running afoul of the brand when they get mad about you posting a pic of their product next to the supposed competition.

In my career I’ve worked at a value-added reseller (VAR) where I found myself bound by certain agreements to talk positively about brands. I’ve also found myself on the wrong side of the table when that brand went into a bidding process with another VAR and then tried to tell me I could say bad things about them in the process because I was also their partner. The situation was difficult because I was selling against a partner that went with another company but I also needed to do the work to do the bid. Hamstringing me by claiming I had to play by some kind of weird rules ultimately made me very frustrated.

Blind Faith

Do companies really want ambassadors that only say positive things about the brand? Do they want people to regurgitate the marketing points with everyone and never discuss the downsides of the product? Would you trust someone that only ever had glowing things to say about something you were trying to buy?

The reality of our world today is that the way that people discuss products like this influences what we think about them. If the person doing the discussion never has a negative thing to say about a company then it creates issues with how they are perceived. It can create issues for a supposedly neutral or unbiased source if they only ever say positive things, especially if it later comes out they weren’t allowed to say something negative for fear they’d get silenced or sued.

Think about those that never say anything negative toward a brand or product. You probably know them by a familiar epithet: fanboys. Whether it’s Apple or Tesla or Android or Ford there are many people out there that aren’t just bound by agreement to always speak positively about something. They will go out of their way to attack those that speak ill of their favorite product. If you’ve every had an interaction with a fan online that left you shaking your head because you can’t understand why they don’t see the issues you know how difficult that conversation can be.

As a company, you want people discussing the challenges your product could potentially face. You want an honest opinion that it doesn’t fit in a particular vertical, for example. Imagine how upset a customer would be if they bought your product based on a review from a biased influencer only to find that it didn’t fit your need because the influencer couldn’t say anything negative. Would that customer be happy with your product? Would the community trust that influencer in the future?

Tom’s Take

Honesty isn’t negativity. You can be critical of something you enjoy and not insinuate you’re trying to destroy it. I’ll be the first person to point out the shortcomings of a product or company. I’ll be fair but honest. I’ll point out where the improvements need to be made. One of the joys of my day job at Tech Field Day is that I have the freedom to say what I want in my private life and not worry about my work agreements getting me in trouble as has happened with some in the past. I’ll always tell you straight up how I feel. That’s how you protect your brand. Not with glowing reviews but with honest discussion.

When Were You Last a Beginner?

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In a couple of weeks I’m taking the opportunity to broaden my leadership horizons by attending the BSA leadership course known as Philmont Leadership Challenge. It’s a course that builds on a lot of the things that I’ve been learning and teaching for the past five years. It’s designed to be a sort of capstone for servant leadership and learning how to inspire others. I’m excited to be a part of it in large part because I get to participate for a change.

Being a member of the staff for my local council Wood Badge courses has given me a great opportunity to learn the material inside and out. I love being able to teach and see others grow into leaders. It’s also inspired me to share some of those lessons here to help others in the IT community that might not have the chance to attend a course like that. However the past 3 years have also shown me the value of being a beginner at something from time to time.

Square One

Everyone is new at something. No one is born knowing every piece of information they’ll need to know for their entire lives. We learn language and history and social skills throughout our formative years. When we get to our career we learn skills and trades and figure out how to do complex things easily. For some of us we also learn how to lead and manage others. It’s a process of building layer upon layer to be better at what we do. Those skills give us the chance to show how far we’ve come in a given area by the way we understand how the complex things we do interact.

One of my favorite stories about this process is when I first started studying for my CCIE back in 2008. I knew the first place I should look was the Cisco Press certification guide for the written exam. As I started reading through the copy I caught myself thinking, “This is easy. I already know this.” I even pondered why I bothered with those pesky CCNP routing books because everything I needed to know was right here!

The practitioners in the audience have already spotted the logical fallacy in my thinking. The CCIE certification guide was easy and remedial for me because I’d already spent so much time reading over those CCNP guides. And those CCNP guides only made sense to me because I’d studied for my CCNA beforehand. The advanced topics I was refreshing myself on could be expanded because I understood the rest of the information that was being presented already.

When you’re a beginner everything looks bigger. There’s so much to learn. It’s worrisome to try and figure out what you need to know. You spend your time categorizing things that might be important later. It can be an overwhelming process. But it’s necessary because it introduces you to the areas you have to understand. You can’t start off knowing everything. You need to work you way into it. You need to digest information and work with it before moving on to add more to what you’ve learned. Trying to drink from a firehose makes it impossible to do anything.

However, when you approach things from a perspective of an expert you lose some of the critical nature of being bad at something. You might think to yourself that you don’t need to remember a protocol number or a timer value because “they never worry about that anyway”. I’ve heard more than a few people in my time skip over valuable information at the start of a course because they want to get to the “good stuff” that they just know comes later. Of course, skipping over the early lessons means they’re going to be spending more time reviewing the later information because they missed the important stuff up front.

Those Who Teach

You might think to yourself that teaching something is a harder job. You need to understand the material well enough to instruct others and anticipate questions. You need to prep and practice. It’s not easy. But it also takes away some of the magic of learning.

Everyone has a moment in their journey with some technology or concept where everything just clicks. You can call it a Eureka moment or something similar but we all remember how it felt. Understanding how the pieces fit together and how you grasp that interconnection is one of the keys to how we process complex topics. If you don’t get it you may never remember it. Those moments mean a lot to someone at the start of their journey.

When you teach something you have to grasp it all. You may have had your Eureka moment already. You’re also hoping that you can inspire one in others. If you’re trying to find ways to impart the knowledge to others based on how you grasped it you may very well inspire that moment. But you also don’t have the opportunity to do it for yourself. We’re all familiar with the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt. It’s easy to fall into that trap with a topic you are intimately familiar with.

In your career have you ever asked a question about a technical subject to an expert that started their explanation with “it’s really easy…”? Most of us have. We’ve probably even said that phrase ourselves. But it’s important to remember that not everyone has had the same experiences. Not everyone knows the topic to the level that we know it. And not everyone is going to form the same connections to recall that information when they need it again. It may be simple to you but for a beginner it’s a difficult subject they’re struggling to understand. How they comprehend it relies heavily on how you impart that knowledge.

Wide Eyed Wonder

Lastly, the thing that I think is missing in the expert level of things is the wonder of learning something new for the first time. It’s easy to get jaded when you have to take in a new piece of information and integrate it into your existing view. It can be frustrating in cases where the new knowledge conflicts with old knowledge. We spent a lot of time learning the old way and now we have to change?

Part of the value of being a beginner is looking at things with fresh eyes. No doubt you’ve heard things like “this is the way we’ve always done it” in meetings before. I’ve written about challenging those assumptions in the past and how to go about doing it properly but having a beginner perspective helps. Pretend I’m new to this. Explain to me why we do it that way. Help me understand. By taking an approach of learning you can see the process and help fix the broken pieces or optimize the things that need to be improved.

Even if you know the subject inside and out it can be important to sit back and think through it from the perspective of a beginner. Why is a vanilla spanning tree timer 50 seconds? What can be improved in that process? Why should things not be hurried. What happens when things go wrong? How long does it take for them to get fixed? These are all valid beginner questions that help you understand how others look at something you’re very familiar with. You’ll find that being able to answer them as a beginner would will lead to even more understanding of the process and the way things are supposed to work.

Tom’s Take

There are times when I desperately want to be new at something again. I struggle with finding the time to jump into a new technology or understand a new concept because my tendency is to want to learn everything about it and there are many times when I can’t. But the value of being new at something isn’t just acquiring new knowledge. It’s learning how a beginner thinks and seeing how they process something. It’s about those Eureka moments and integrating things into your process. It’s about chaos and change and eventually understanding. So if you find yourself burned out it’s important to stop and ask when you were last a beginner.