There were scattered reports of the state party’s app functioning properly.

This is kind of interesting. Of course there is all sorts of media spinning because it can so easily be seen through partisan lenses. But there is a different way of looking at it.

From The 1,600 Volunteers Who Were Supposed to Make the Iowa Caucuses Run Smoothly by Sydney Ember and Reid J. Epstein.

The context is that the Democratic Party had their caucuses last night in Iowa and botched the exercise. We are still in the middle of the travesty but it appears that it was a predictable failure arising from bad project and program management. As a management consultant, one area where I practice is helping boards or executive teams do a postmortem on failed projects in order to learn and fix. What went wrong, why, where and how do we avoid failing in the future?

Almost always, in complex systems, it is not a single root cause. Many things have to go wrong in an improbable sequence in order for complete failure to occur.

And that appears to have been the case in Iowa. They developed an app that was neither well tested nor deployed in time with sufficient training or documentation. They appear to have reduced their call-in lines in anticipation of everyone using the app and so when the app failed, people called and could not get through. So failure of technology design, failure of product deployment, failure of process design and failure of project management.

It happens. Republicans are of course sniggering. It is almost too perfect a setup for the obvious question "How can they be trusted to run the country of 320 million people when they can't run their own caucus of a couple hundred thousand loyal and stalwart Iowa Democrats. It is both a pertinent but also an unfair question. Simultaneously. Complex systems are far more prone to failure than we acknowledge and typically complex projects fail to achieve the stated business goals, on time and on budget 80% of the time.

But no doubt it was a very public failure.

What is intriguing to me is the content of the reporting in the above linked article. While this was clearly a project management and program management failure of significant portions, participants, aided by the press, are trying to off-load the failure on to individuals. Or groups of individuals. In this case, older retirees. It is rank stereotyping and prejudice, front and center.

According to more than a dozen Iowa Democratic Party officials, county chairmen and volunteers involved in running precincts, many precinct leaders ignored the party’s request that they download the app before caucus night or found the process of installing it too cumbersome.

Instead, as they had always done, they planned to call their precinct results in. But some found it took hours for any of the dozens of people at party headquarters in Des Moines to pick up the phone to receive the results. What followed was an epic collapse of the rickety system Iowa has relied on for decades to tabulate the results of a largely analog electoral contest.

“Most of my precinct chairs were a little older,” said Laura Hubka, the Democratic chairwoman in Northern Iowa’s Howard County. “They weren’t comfortable with it.”

The old people botched it.

“I have 75-year-old caucus chairs who are sitting here going, ‘I’m just going to call that in,’” she said. “This was too many new things to learn for a lot of people. Not everybody that goes to the caucus is a 20-year-old college kid.”

Those dang old people.

However, the article is rife with evidence rebutting the stereotype of old bunglers. The app clearly failed for many or most people, regardless of age. I love this line:

There were scattered reports of the state party’s app functioning properly.

If that isn't an indictment, I don't know what is. I empathize. Big system deployments and cut-overs are hard. But this is well traveled territory. We know how to run large complex programs. The Iowa Democrats failed to invest in running a large complex project and winged it, hoping the pieces would come together. But Pandora's gift is not a reliable strategy.

The fiasco was entirely predictable. I suspect, if there is ever a postmortem, we are going to find all sorts of memos with warnings that more time is needed, more testing needed, and or more training is needed and we are also going to find mid-level managers cutting corners, and central decision-makers too far removed from the details to comprehend the accumulating project risk. That it is the usual thing you find.

But in the midst of everything, when casting about for a scapegoat, the party of tolerance and humanity and equity and diversity appears as prone, in a pinch, to stereotyping and scapegoating of the most common sort. The old folks don't understand technology.