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Photo by Steve Portigal
CHAPTER 3
Control Is an Illusion
Diane Loviglio: Interrupted Interview
Elaine Ann: I Thought My Client Was Going to Die
Ryan DeGorter: Enthusiasticus Interruptus
Nicolas Nova: Do You Want Me to Act?
Vanessa Pfafflin: DDoSed in Vegas
Elaine Fukuda: They Call Me Mister
You know about this room. It’s a really big room. It’s something more than a room, but that’s the best word we know to describe this space, this enclosure of technology and urgency. You know about this room—it’s clean and organized and is populated by an abundance of uniformed workers in headsets, seated at workstations before a massive wall-sized video display. Meanwhile, an intense man in eyeglasses and shirt sleeves is shouting instructions. Whatever optimism we might have felt at one point has now devolved into grim concern.
This is the Control Room. Any movie that shows us a Control Room is tipping its hand broadly: things are soon going to be very badly Out Of Control. This highly designed system is hubris made manifest, and we’re all gonna see what happens when its dwellers encounter unanticipated circumstances. The intel is wrong! The monster is impervious to our weapons! The enemy agent has spotted the surveillance team! The target is still in the safe house! The Control Room is a monument to the planning, systems, routines, processes, and procedures that lead to success, but its brittleness is revealed when what’s required is improvisation.
The Control Room (and its inhabitants) is safely ensconced in a bunker, a safe house, at headquarters. But the real action—which they watch semi-helplessly on that wall-sized video display—is out in the field. If there is to be any success today, it will be because of a field team that rejects the naïveté of the Control Room.
This gulf between abstracted plans and on-the-ground reality is a real concern to the researcher. The realities we’ll read about here aren’t as epic and the body count is far lower than in film, but the stories remind us that you can’t anticipate all of what will happen in the field. We anticipate our destinations in their optimal versions, but unanticipated ordinary and extraordinary occurrences are coming for us.
Ironically, the bonus value of this kind of research is in the things that you can’t anticipate—that you’d never think to ask about—but discover once you enter the context you’re interested in. If you go to a customer’s site, you can’t control what’s going on in their business that day, whether it’s the management, as Diane Loviglio discovers, or the technology, as Vanessa Pfafflin experiences. If you do research in public, you can’t plan for who else will be there or what will take place. Elaine Ann and Ryan DeGorter remind us that if you are working with people, you can’t control what else might happen with them on any given day. Nicolas Nova and Elaine Fukuda run into some interesting people during their fieldwork. The Control Room manifests a belief that you can anticipate and design for anything, but the lesson we take from the drama is that we will fail if we believe that.
