251–252 of 252 posts
Absurd errors in this article. Starting with: "it was from an era that computers didn't have a hard drive" Absolute BS. Pretty much every computer had a hard drive in 1998, and most had CD-ROM. Then they referred to the 3.5" disk as a "5-inch floppy."
Saying it more times doesn't make it more true. >
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For sure. I think a lot of this is just about how heavy the planning cycles are. A lot of stuff like that is developed through big, waterfall planning efforts and large outsourcing contracts. Most of the choices were made before they had their first user, and once it's all installed any revision would be a) expensive, and b) a black eye for the people in charge. And in some ways I don't blame people for doing this, b…
I think a lot of projects have adopted a ritualism around an ideal that only exist in renders vs actual learned pragmatism as well. Despite these glaring shortcomings that I really must not be the only one to realize, the system still creates new stations or other infrastructure beholden to the same shortcomings. Pro transit journalists have their work cut out for them: it's so easy to ding these builds on a usual la…
There are alternatives, though! In Rother's "Toyota Kata", he describes a Toyota practice where they pick some far-off goal (which I think is called a "target condition"). That can be something that nobody knows how to do. Then they take one step in that direction and reassess. Over time the path might be somewhat wandering as they learn what works and what doesn't. Or they might revise the goal based on new knowledge. But they keep going, step by step.
That's a lot like short-cycle iterative software processes. Which I know work, because I've used them for many projects. But even software, which is infinitely soft, often gets the same sort of fantasy-driven planning.
I think you're right that the ultimate problem is how authority behaves, and at least in the US there's a terrible managerial culture that this is embedded in. My solution has been to find small pockets of sanity, but I've not figured out how to scale that up. But you might find some hope in this Mary Poppendieck talk, where she explains that it hasn't always been this way: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/tyranny-of-plan/