The Standard Is Inherited

Two men taught me how to do this work. Neither of them was in the room on the day it counted.

Michael Dickson hired me in December 1996. He was the founding director of the Center for the Application of Information Technologies at Western Illinois University, and the Illinois Board of Higher Education had chartered it as a center that same year. I was a green application developer and I had no idea that the thing I had walked into was still wet.

What I carry from him is not a lesson. It is a decision I watched him make.

Macomb had a Saturday program for kids called PRIME, founded in 1995 by two residents, Allen Henderson and Aaron Thorpe. Any child in town between eight and eighteen could join. The morning began with two hours of community service, then two hours of instruction, then recreation in the afternoon. CAIT provided the instruction, and it provided its services and its facilities free of charge.

That is Dickson, on the record, in a university news release. He finished the sentence by saying it was not just a mission statement either, but something his staff believed in and supported with their time and talent. Every CAIT employee who worked that program did it as a volunteer.

I was in my twenties and I filed it under nice. It took me the better part of twenty years to understand that it was a control.

A mission statement nobody funds with something they personally own is decoration. He was telling anyone paying attention what the difference was, and he was demonstrating it rather than announcing it. He spent his career designing networks and implementing distance learning across the United States and the Pacific, later served as Special Assistant to the President for Technology, and in 2001 received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the United States Distance Learning Association. He died in December 2022.

I never told him any of what is in this essay.

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Robert McInerney was the Chief Information Officer at the Cook County Sheriff's Office on the day I arrived in September 2012. Over the next four years I moved through four roles under him: Director of Application Development, then Director of Business Intelligence, which I founded and ran concurrently, then Chief Technology Officer, then Deputy CIO.

In February 2016 he left.

I became Interim CIO that same month.

That is the part nobody prepares you for. A mentor's last lesson gets delivered by absence. Everything he had taught me about how a six-unit bureau actually holds together, about what a budget conversation is really about, about which fights are worth having in the open, had been theory while he was still there to correct me. It converted into knowledge the week there was nobody left to ask.

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Here is what I now think mentorship is, and it is not what the word suggests.

It is not encouragement. It is not sponsorship, although good mentors sponsor. It is not access, and it is not a standing coffee.

Mentorship is the transfer of a standard. And a standard is distinguishable from an opinion by exactly one property: you can be held to it when the person who taught it to you is not there.

An opinion requires its author present to survive contact. A standard does not. That is the entire difference, and it is why the transfer is almost impossible to fake. You cannot hand someone a standard in a conversation. They have to watch you be held to it, ideally at a moment when holding to it costs you something.

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I learned the mechanism years before I had a word for it.

Before any of this I was a Crew Chief on KC-135 Stratotankers. I held Red X authority, which meant an aircraft flew or sat grounded on my inspection and my signature, and that once I entered that symbol no one in the chain of command could direct me to change it. Not my supervisor. Not the weight of a mission that needed the airplane in the air.

That is not a story about aviation. It is a story about what a signature is for.

The signature is the transfer mechanism. When you sign your name where someone junior can see it, you are showing them precisely what you are willing to be held to, and you are showing them that the standard survives pressure. That is the whole curriculum. Everything else is commentary.

Dickson signed by putting his center's time behind something with no revenue attached and no press release waiting at the end. McInerney signed by handing me progressively larger pieces of an organization I was not obviously ready for, on his own credibility, and then by leaving and letting the thing hold.

I have said for years that the work is to design it right, secure it, and sign your name to it. I have not, until now, said out loud that the third clause is the inherited one. The first two I can teach. The third one I was given.

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I spent roughly sixteen years with my hands directly on the work, and the years since leading the people who do it. The image I keep returning to is that I fought in the trenches and I now design them, so the people who come after me fight better, safer, and with a materially better chance of winning.

After me. Never under me. The hierarchy version of that sentence is weaker than the outcome version, and I have watched leaders choose the weaker one because it feels better to say.

The trench is the artifact. The standard is what actually gets carried forward, and it only gets carried by somebody who watched another person be held to it first.

I owe two men for mine. I told one of them far too little, and I told the other one nothing at all.

If you still have a mentor above ground, that is a solvable problem. It is solvable this week.

Michael W. Dickson, 1952 to 2022. Memorials may be directed to WIU Tri States Public Radio or the Humane Society of McDonough County. Quotation and program details from Western Illinois University Office of University Relations.

— Keith Formell