The Catwalk

There is a book I have been listening to lately called The Phoenix Project. If you work in technology or run a business that depends on it – which is every business – it is worth your time.

There is a moment in the book that I keep coming back to. A seasoned mentor takes a struggling IT leader up to a catwalk above a manufacturing plant floor and shows him something he had never been able to see from ground level: the whole system. Not the broken part. Not the fire everyone was running toward. The entire flow of work, from one end of the floor to the other, moving the way it was supposed to move – or not moving the way it was supposed to move – visible all at once from thirty feet up.

That image has never left me. Because it is exactly what I do every time I walk into a business that is having problems.

I go to the catwalk first.

What the Catwalk Actually Is

For me the catwalk is not a physical place. It is a discipline.

Before I open a laptop. Before I pull a cable. Before I ask a single technical question – I watch. I look at how the business is running. I look at what is connected to what. I look at what people are doing and how they are doing it and what the technology around them actually looks like.

Most people who get called in to fix something go straight to the problem they were called about. And sometimes that is the right move. But more often the thing they were called about is a symptom, not the cause. And if you fix the symptom without seeing the whole system, you will be back next month fixing the next symptom, and the month after that fixing the one after that.

The catwalk changes that. From up there you can see things the people on the floor stopped seeing a long time ago – because when you live inside a system every day, you stop noticing what is wrong with it.

What I Saw at One Business

I walked into a business not long ago that was having network issues. Slowdowns. Dropped connections. Devices that would not stay online. The kind of problems that had probably been building for a while before anyone decided to call someone.

I went to the catwalk.

And within sixty seconds I could see the whole picture.

In the corner of the server room – if you could call it that – sat a three-pack Wi-Fi mesh router system. The kind you can buy online from a big box retailer for a few hundred dollars. The kind that is marketed for a large home or a small apartment complex. Designed for maybe twenty, thirty devices at the outside.

This one was running 114.

Every workstation, every tablet, every point-of-sale terminal, every back-office computer, every device in the building – all of them running through a consumer mesh system that was never built for anything close to that load.

And the switch connecting everything to the internet? An $85 unit. Not enterprise. Not managed. The kind of switch that works fine for a home office and starts quietly failing when you ask it to do what an enterprise switch does.

The Cisco switch – the actual enterprise hardware sitting right there in the same room – was connected downstream from the consumer gear. Why? Because when someone had tried to connect it the right way, the Wi-Fi would not work. Something about trunk ports and VLAN tagging. So they plugged it in the other way and it worked and they moved on.

The client told me this story with complete sincerity. This is what the previous person told them. This is what they had been living with.

I kept my face neutral. Inside I was already running.

The Internal Monologue From the Catwalk

Here is what goes through my head when I see something like that.

The first thought is genuine respect. I mean that. They tried. They built something that worked with what they had and what they knew and they kept the business running on it. Ten years ago I might have done the same thing – if it works, it works, right? There is no shame in that. There is only the moment when working is no longer enough.

The second thought is honest dread – the good kind. I have to tell them that the very thing that has kept them running is now the thing causing their problems. And the only way to prove it is to replace it with something much better. That conversation is never easy. But it is necessary.

And then the third thing happens, and this is the part that is hard to explain to someone who has not felt it.

My brain goes somewhere else entirely.

It is like being Bill S. Preston and Ted Theodore Logan in their time-traveling phone booth – if instead of history, that booth routed you through every power line, protocol, and signal path in the building at once. If you have not seen Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, the short version is two guys who can go anywhere instantly and experience everything simultaneously. That is what my brain does in that moment. Running through protocols and connections and cables and radio waves and signal paths and failover scenarios all at once, checking every possible variable, making sure there is nothing else hiding underneath the obvious problem. Because sometimes the mesh router is the whole story. And sometimes the mesh router is just the thing you can see and there is something else underneath it that you will not find until you start pulling threads.

You never know what you are going to see from the catwalk. That is what makes it interesting. It might be one piece out of place. It might be a whole company out of place. Either way you know you are in for a ride.

What the Catwalk Teaches You About Business

The reason I love that moment in The Phoenix Project is that it captures something true about how systems work – whether the system is a manufacturing plant, an IT department, or a thirty-person business running on a consumer mesh router.

You cannot fix what you cannot see. And you cannot see the whole system when you are standing in the middle of it responding to whatever is on fire right now.

The catwalk is not arrogance. It is not the IT person thinking they know more than the business. It is the discipline of looking before touching – of understanding the full picture before changing any part of it.

Because here is what I have learned after years of going to the catwalk first: the thing that is broken is almost never the thing that looks broken. It is usually something upstream of that. Something that was working fine until the business grew past it. Something that nobody thought to revisit because it was working and working things do not get attention.

If you want to understand what is actually happening in your technology environment – not just the symptom, but the cause – you need someone willing to go to the catwalk first.

The view from up there changes everything.

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Related reading: Your Network Is Part of Your Customer Experience · Working Internet Is the Lowest Standard · Good Infrastructure Is Invisible Until It Fails

Kelly Hansen is the author of The IT Dilemma: Why Good Businesses Fail During Cyberattacks, Outages, and Technology Disasters – and How to Prevent It. Have a question about your own environment? Reach out: Contact, or connect with me on LinkedIn.