Change Advisory Board

Tag: disaster recovery

  • The Mason and The Mainframe

    The Mason and The Mainframe

    What do the IBM Z Mainframe and Ancient Freemasonry have in common? They are both obsessed with one thing: Endurance.

    In this episode of The Cab Call, we attempt a seemingly absurd comparison between the digital world and the social world. We pit the “Mainframe Advocate” against the “Masonry Advocate” to debate the concept of State Preservation.

    One runs on silicon, electricity, and error-correcting code. The other runs on ritual, memory, and oral tradition. Both are trying to achieve the exact same goal: keeping a specific set of data intact while the world around them changes.

    The Challenge: Which is harder? Preserving a banking ledger with zero corruption for 60 years, or preserving a spoken ritual word-for-word for six centuries?

    Transmission: How Mainframe modernization (CDC, Refactoring) compares to Masonic “Word Pairs” and the “Attentive Ear.”

    Resilience: Disaster recovery (GDPS, Metro Mirror) vs. the distributed network of human memory.

    The Crisis: How both systems face an identical existential threat—the skills gap and the need for apprenticeship.

    Join us as we decide whether it’s harder to preserve a binary digit or a moral truth.

    Sources

  • Compassion and The Compass

    Compassion and The Compass

    This episode walks straight into the messy, human middle ground between loving people and losing yourself in the process. Using the story of Paul and Eunice—a sober helper and a deeply traumatized veteran—we unpack what compassion really looks like when trauma, addiction, resentment, and financial collapse all live under the same roof.

    Guided by the compass of Freemasonry and the inner fortress of Stoic philosophy, we explore the idea of the cable tow as a moral boundary: the point beyond which “helping” turns into self-destruction. We connect that to how we run systems and services under stress—incidents, outages, RTOs, RPOs, blameless postmortems—and show that both people and platforms need the same thing: clear limits, honest observation, and recovery plans that actually work.

    This isn’t an abstract seminar. It’s trauma, rent, sobriety, hatred, love, and the quiet power of one small, consistent life lived decently in front of another broken person.

    In this episode, we explore:

    • How trauma reshapes a worldview—and why one honest counter-example can start to crack it

    • Why “compassion does not require self-immolation,” and what healthy boundaries really look like

    • How Marcus Aurelius would diagnose over-giving, resentment, and walking away “without hatred”

    • The parallels between personal recovery and organizational recovery: incidents, DR tests, and blameless postmortems

    • Practical steps for people who feel like Paul (the overwhelmed helper) or Eunice (the traumatized survivor) today

    This is an episode about keeping your heart open and your compass steady.

    Source #01: Paul and Eunice is a personal story from real people in my personal life. Names have been changed to protect the identities of the individuals.