20/20 hindsight

Why do we never see it coming?

We’ve just had an incident at work. You could say a major incident.

We were trying to host a member webinar with over 1,000 registrants with a new webinar software, and (you know where this is going) the webinar crashed and burned as soon as it started. In the words of my boss, it “went down about as well as a cigar party on the Hindenburg.”¹

We had to cancel and reschedule the webinar, then apologise profusely to our members.

This meltdown took us all by surprise, and me especially. I loved the software we were using. Everything was so easy to use, the features intuitive, the customer support stellar. Not once while setting things up in the weeks leading up to the webinar did I have the tiniest inkling of a thought that the webinar itself would (again, in the words of my boss) “crash and burn in a blaze of frozen screens and disjointed audio.”

20/20 hindsight

I was telling a friend this story over lunch the other day, and as I was weaving the events into a compelling narrative that would regale her,² I realised something:

There was not one, but two red flags that should have set alarm bells ringing from the moment we decided to go with the webinar software.³

The first red flag was that a few days before the webinar, we sent out a link to our 20k+ members to register, and almost immediately received reports of the registration form not working. The entire website was down at one point and we couldn’t log into our admin account.

One member of the team said this did not inspire confidence in the webinar software, but there was no talk of the webinar actually failing. I don’t think any of us expected the actual webinar to not work.

The second red flag, which chronologically is the first, was that I couldn’t change the account email when I was trying to set up the admin account. The website was simply not responding.

In 20/20 hindsight, this was a sign of a basic functionality of the website not working. The engineers were able to fix it, but it’s something that shouldn’t happen in the first place. At the time, of course, I was just happy that the issue was swiftly fixed so I could get on with it.

Looking back, these were red flags that should have set alarm bells ringing, but we were all oblivious. None of us saw it coming.

Why are we so blind?

20/20 hindsight is all well and good when you’re doing post mortem. But is there nothing we can do to actually see what’s going on while it’s happening so we don’t (metaphorically) die in the first place?

I was so in love with the webinar software that I let myself overlook every negative event that occurred. I chose to pay attention to the simple user interface, the excellent customer support, and completely ignored whether the technology was actually working.

When the registration form stopped working and the entire website went down, that should have set off a thousand massive alarms. But it didn’t. I was blind.

But why? Why was I so blind?

Was it because I was so anxious for the webinar to go well that I refused to acknowledge any signs that it might not? Because the technical failures didn’t fit with the shiny positive image of the software that I had in my head?

Was I fooling myself? Or did I simply lack the experience to be able to recognise those red flags? If it’s a question of fooling myself, what can I do to stop? And if it’s a question of experience, am I doomed to blindness in every single new venture I ever decide to take on?

What do you think?

These are the questions swimming around my head these past few days. A lot of questions, and not a whole lot of answer. So I’m asking for your help, Dear Reader:

Why do we only see 20/20 in hindsight? Do we impose this blindness on ourselves? Is there anything we can do?

Leave a comment, send a reply, share this with someone who’s got better eyesight than me…

Until next Friday… Stay thoughtful,

Val

p.s. At the time of writing this post, the rescheduled webinar is happening in four days. Hopefully by the time your eyeballs are on these very words, the webinar will have gone without a hitch. Ask me about it later.

p.p.s. The rescheduled webinar was a success. Thank you Zoom for working. No thank you Zoom for being so complicated that I wish we could go back to our first webinar software for its ease of use and responsive customer service. #ifonlywecouldhaveitall

1. I wasn’t there, so can’t provide a first-hand account, but judging from the messages being exchanged by the team on Slack at the time of, it wasn’t pretty.

2. I always aim to please. Unless if I’m tired, in which case I will just sit and stare blankly into your face. (Not at it, into it.)

3. Which shall remain unnamed. As I mentioned, I do love their product and believe our webinar failure was the exception, not the rule. After we reported the issue, they promptly discovered the source of the meltdown and made it their top priority to “resolve the issue permanently.”