ISSUE 15 — 1111: THE WAR ROOM GARDEN
“Automation tends to turn us from actors into observers.” — Nicholas Carr
New to farm life and tied to a full-time job in the city, you hire the neighboring farmer to tend your land and teach you and your daughters. He’s young but weathered, prematurely aged by labor, balding at the temples, with a laugh that softens the lines on his face. He arrives on a Criollo horse — muscular, chestnut, with zebra-like leg stripes — and jumps down as the animal settles. He wipes dust from his black RAMONES T‑shirt, probably given to him by your mom, shakes hands, and teases your khaki overalls, straw hats, red neckerchiefs, and rawhide gloves. Playful and wise, he shows you how to cut a bunch of bananas and the main stem.
He explains the banana’s lifecycle with the care of someone who’s watched seasons more than calendars: planting, rapid growth, flowering, maintenance, and harvest/regeneration. Each pseudostem fruit once; after the harvest, the stem is cut down and its material returns to the soil. From the base, a daughter shoot grows to replace the mother, while a smaller follower pup waits behind it, three generations arranged to maximize energy and continuity: the fruiting mother, the growing daughter, and the follower. Prune poorly, and you waste the plant’s power; prune well, and the system renews itself.
You carry that image back to the States. The lesson lingers like a follower pup in the mind, not pruned, not yet ready to be called into duty, an idea that will grow only after you’ve tended it with more hands-on work.
At work, you articulate a discipline: MOA. First, do the task manually, learn all its rough edges and hidden costs. Second, optimize it and cut wasteful steps so the process runs on fewer resources. Third, automate it and encode the lean process into instructions that allow the task to run reliably without constant human intervention.
MOA is practical reverence for Wabi‑Sabi: the quiet beauty of simplicity earned through attention. It’s also a resistance to the siren call of premature automation, the rush to replace messy human know-how with brittle scripts and dashboards. Like the banana, a process must ripen through stages; automate before it’s matured, and the harvest will fail.
You sketch MOA into the team’s playbook: treat processes like plants, observe their lifecycle, favor the daughter that will succeed the mother, and leave room for the follower pup to emerge. Automation should not be a shortcut from seed to sterile trunk; it should be the careful pruning that preserves vigor.
Automation tends to turn us from actors into observers. Instead of manipulating the yoke, we watch the screen. That shift may make our lives easier, but it can also inhibit our ability to learn and to develop expertise — Nicholas Carr
The IT room began as a closet and became a sanctuary. After culling the old stock, the team moved equipment upstairs into two rooms: a large area littered with recycling bins and the IT space, a chaotic nest for four people. The war room smelled of solder, coffee, and breakfast sandwiches (bacon, egg, and cheese in a sesame roll), whiteboards scrawled with half-baked schematics, computers with unfinished builds, and discarded hardware sprawled on the floor like banana leaves. It was messy, but it was fertile. Ideas sprouted in the disorder.
Get THE WAY OF IT’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
You shadow the Junior Sys Admin: suburban, introverted, punk bassist on weekends, uniformed in black jeans, band tees, and ragged Converse. His minimalism belies a deep, practiced competence. With him, you share a non-linear path into IT and a mutual appetite for hands-on mastery.
Then growth arrived like a late-season storm. Hired quickly, new roles multiplied responsibilities before processes were mature. The team now consisted of a Director, Senior SysAdmin, System Admin, two Support Specialists, a Network Admin, and a Project Manager, the first female in a male dominated field.
Eventually, the team worked like a well-tended plot. Within the company, they were called The Magnificent Seven, guarding the village against inefficiency, non‑compliance, and unpredictability as the business prepared for audits and a public listing. Meetings shifted from tinkering and troubleshooting to sprint goals and dashboards. The instinct was to automate everything: ticket routing, deployments, monitoring alerts, make it repeatable, make it fast. But without the manual and optimization stages, automation amplified errors. A script misapplied a configuration across environments; a rollback procedure had never been practiced end-to-end; a compliance checklist was encoded before anyone had owned it; the automated alarm summoned panic without a plan.
You remembered the banana. The premature pseudostem, cut too soon, leaves the daughter undernourished; automation without manual mastery is the same mistake. MOA would have demanded: first, run the rollout by hand and document the steps; second, strip the unnecessary steps and codify the minimal actions; third, automate with safeguards and tested fallbacks. Instead, the team treated tools as masters rather than servants, and, for a while, became instruments of their own automation; human cogs for processes no longer fully under their control.
You began to reintroduce rhythm: shadow more, practice more, prune less hastily. The junior admin taught you how to rebuild a server by hand until the commands were muscle memory. Dry runs were performed for audits and diapered scripts with manual kill switches. The war room’s chaos regained purpose; the banana‑leaf strewn floor felt less like neglect and more like the compost that feeds the next healthy shoot.
In the end, MOA didn’t promise immunity from failure. It gives a pattern: respect the lifecycle, learn each stage, and automate only when the system can sustain itself. Like the farmer’s careful pruning, it’s a small humility in the face of growth, an acknowledgment that some things must be tended, not replaced.
Today in history: June 10th, 1858, Two ships head out to begin work on what will become the first operational Transatlantic cable.
If your automated system fails or produces incorrect data, how long will it take you to notice, and do you still have the manual skills to fix it?
