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Planning is for doing

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Re: Planning is for doing

#31

Post by navane »

"None of these take into account the needs of the drivers, so should characterize them as unjust. For example, one driver might be late to catch their flight (costing them hundreds of dollars), while another might be on a leisurely cruise around town with no particular destination."

I don't know how to put this into words, but I hate that "doing nothing" is equated by being worth less, or less urgent, or having less rights. Your emergency is not my urgency, or something along those lines. If I choose to live slow leisurely, I shouldn't loose any rights over it.

Re: Planning is for doing

#32

Post by tempodox »

exmadscientist wrote: post #6
ElevenLathe wrote: post #3

I work in crisis management, sometimes on tense, hours-long outage calls. Very often, engineers or others on the call will say things like "It would be nice to run test $x before we move forward." It basically always pays to ask a counter-question like "Will we want to change our action in some way based on the result of this test?" Often the answer is no, so we can skip doing the test and get to remediation faster.…

> question like "Will we want to change our action in some way based on the result of this test?" This is my absolute favorite question. I am continually amazed at how much crap it can cut through.

This happens in a surprisingly large number of contexts. People raise questions and invest time and energy looking for an answer without the slightest idea how or if the answer will inform future decisions. Seems to be a human fallacy.

Re: Planning is for doing

#33

Post by hef19898 »

pqwEfkvjs wrote: post #29
DoreenMichele wrote: post #7

A couple of things this makes me think of: No plan survives contact with the enemy. It's a military saying but I think it applies equally to business. I think that's the whole point of rubrics about how much you need to talk to customers. When seconds count, the police are minutes away. Said by pro gun people. I'm of mixed feelings about that but I still like the saying very much to encapsulate an idea about making h…

> No plan survives contact with the enemy. I've also heard a variation like "It is certain that the plan will fail, however, without the plan everything fails."

Or "Failing to plan means planning to fail".

Re: Planning is for doing

#34

Post by ethanwillis »

wellpast wrote: post #26

What is the name for the fallacy in which you make an analogy that does not reflect the real-world territory at all, and then draw a conclusion from it? “Doing” is not at all enough. (Well, it shouldn’t be.) Peer into any random engineering org and you’ll inevitably find loads of engineers driving around in circles with the wind in their hair, smiling with a sense of how “fast” and productively they’re moving!

  It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means of metaphors 
  and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the novel to the familiar. 
  Under sufficiently slow and gradual change, it works reasonably well; in the case 
  of a sharp discontinuity, however, the method breaks down: though we may glorify 
  it with the name "common sense", our past experience is no longer relevant, the 
  analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than illuminating. 
  This is the situation that is characteristic for the "radical" novelty.
On the cruelty of really teaching computing science Edsger Dijkstra

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E...

Re: Planning is for doing

#35

Post by [deleted] »

exmadscientist wrote: post #6
ElevenLathe wrote: post #3

I work in crisis management, sometimes on tense, hours-long outage calls. Very often, engineers or others on the call will say things like "It would be nice to run test $x before we move forward." It basically always pays to ask a counter-question like "Will we want to change our action in some way based on the result of this test?" Often the answer is no, so we can skip doing the test and get to remediation faster.…

> question like "Will we want to change our action in some way based on the result of this test?" This is my absolute favorite question. I am continually amazed at how much crap it can cut through.

[deleted]

Re: Planning is for doing

#36

Post by wreath »

anotherevan wrote: post #9

The driving parable reminded me of my one and only time driving in the USA. The thing that absolutely did my head in was the intersections with four-way stop signs. There was no clear indication of who had right of way which I would have thought would cause a lot of collisions. It just seemed like the biggest bully goes first. Give me roundabouts any day.

Most people dont know how to drive in roundabouts even in cities where they are plentiful. I like how it is most of Europe; always yield to the right in the absence of signs that say otherwise (priority sign or traffic lights)

Re: Planning is for doing

#37

Post by teekert »

“The system in the parable is clearly more just”

Only if you believe “need” should trump all other considerations. One can argue whether that is the way. I’d say it’s quite an assumption to build on.

Re: Planning is for doing

#38

Post by zwkrt »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #3

I work in crisis management, sometimes on tense, hours-long outage calls. Very often, engineers or others on the call will say things like "It would be nice to run test $x before we move forward." It basically always pays to ask a counter-question like "Will we want to change our action in some way based on the result of this test?" Often the answer is no, so we can skip doing the test and get to remediation faster.…

I completely agree with the sentiment of this post for the purposes of solving business problems, and more generally for making rational decisions in one's life. I find it intriguing though, because I think a way of rephrasing your argument is that one should make sure that all of one's questions and approaches should be instrumental toward a goal. In every-day life, the only kind of person who truly takes this approach interpersonally is a sociopath. This kind of person only interacts with others as a means to their own ends, and generally the goal is efficiency and material gain.

It makes sense, because at some level the success of a corporation is totally devoid of purpose outside the maximization of profit. I just think it is interesting how that bleeds into the habits of employees. How much of that do we take home?

Re: Planning is for doing

#39

Post by pirate787 »

anotherevan wrote: post #9

The driving parable reminded me of my one and only time driving in the USA. The thing that absolutely did my head in was the intersections with four-way stop signs. There was no clear indication of who had right of way which I would have thought would cause a lot of collisions. It just seemed like the biggest bully goes first. Give me roundabouts any day.

Roundabouts are superior to traffic lights but take more space. In low traffic areas, four way stops are best as they take less room than roundabouts.

Re: Planning is for doing

#40

Post by blowski »

infogulch wrote: post #10
exmadscientist wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> question like "Will we want to change our action in some way based on the result of this test?" This is my absolute favorite question. I am continually amazed at how much crap it can cut through.

My favorite when making long term decisions is "Do we need to make the decision between these choices now , or can we proceed keeping all the choices open and make the decision later?" Sometimes there's a belabored debate between two choices and answering this question can reveal that the choices don't have to branch right now, that they have (or could have) a shared 'path prefix', enabling us to make the choice late…

Sometimes there’s an underlying agenda to these conversations. The people involved are like lions trying to find out who’s the “alpha” - they’re less interested in the decision than establishing a hierarchy in the decision-making process.
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