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Planning is for doing

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Re: Planning is for doing

#41

Post by anotherevan »

wreath wrote: post #36
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)

I'll agree roundabouts are tricky if you are not use to them. And those giant ones in Europe look insane. When teaching my kids to drive it was one of the trickier skills they had to master - being able to read the traffic and know when they can go.

Still beats those four-way stop signs though! :-)

Re: Planning is for doing

#42

Post by anotherevan »

pirate787 wrote: post #39
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.

Actually I think traffic lights are better for very busy and/or very large intersections. But roundabouts are superior to four way stop sign intersections in every way. They don't even need to be all that large.

Re: Planning is for doing

#43

Post by funac »

bitwize wrote: post #15
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.

The rule for four-way stops is simple: Right-of-way is established in order of arrival at the intersection. First to arrive at the stop sign can go first, followed by the second, etc. Not everybody follows the rule, and technically they're breaking traffic laws by doing so. And you're right. I prefer roundabouts too, they're objectively safer. Massachusetts has a fair few roundabouts, but other parts of the country s…

not in Illinois: here, after whoever arrived first goes, the right of way goes to whoever is to their right (or, next, going counter clockwise), regardless when they arrived (as long as they arrived before the first car went)

Re: Planning is for doing

#44

Post by solatic »

jimmySixDOF wrote: post #27
mjr00 wrote: post #4

> Finally, the third, and most pernicious situation in which there is too much planning is when planning becomes its own end. This can happen because individuals in organizations get more reward for planning work than actually executing on it. It might be seen that the execution is the “easy part”, and can be done by anyone, whereas the grand visionary (or “architect”) is the real cause of success. I've experienced t…

Over Planning is also an institutional response to risk. In these cases it is actually "the easy part" and so preferred by environments where any mistakes are costly. As in the "If at first you don't succeed, then Sky Diving is not for you" kind. In these cases I would not call planning an end in itself but rather a defense mechanism deployed to avoid the risk of action until absolutely necessary. Not that I justify…

> also an institutional response to risk

To further elaborate on this point, sometimes that risk is internally created. If you get negative feedback for doing something everyone agrees is valuable, negative because it's not what your manager would have chosen as the highest priority, or because the architect would have planned the implementation slightly differently, etc., then the natural response to that negative feedback is "OK, next time, let's do some more planning so that you'll be happier with the work that's being done." What makes customers happy and what makes managers happy is not always the same thing.

Great organizations embrace risk. Not reckless risk, not the kind where you say "eh, this might result in two-day downtime for all our customers, YOLO", but the kind where you say "I prefer that my workers make imperfect decisions that we can fix later if we really need to so that the whole organization can move faster". 80% of the time, the decision does not need to be fixed. 80% of the remaining 20%, you don't have time to fix it, and usually, that actually works out OK, all things considered.

Re: Planning is for doing

#45

Post by ozim »

blowski wrote: post #40
infogulch wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I really like "alpha" guys when it comes to decisions that they have to take responsibility later on.

Usually "alphaing" is about no stakes decisions which makes me super annoyed. Team could just make any decision and be done with it.

Re: Planning is for doing

#46

Post by jameshart »

rocqua wrote: post #23
jameshart wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. This question is a superpower. Not just 'the result of this test', this applies to all kinds of questions. It's also relevant when people ask for ill-specified 'dashboards', or 'reports'. Will what we do change substantially based on what we see on these dashboards? If not, why make them? And if so... can we just automate that behavior so we don't have to rely on someone noticing the dashboard?

I think some dashboards are meant for some form of situational awareness. At least "I can see when something is different" ideally even "I can recognize if everything is going well". For those purposes it is difficult to answer 'what will we change' and even harder to automate the process.

Yes, not arguing dashboards are a bad idea in all cases.

If there are five things you always need to go and check when someone asks you ‘is the system running okay?’ Or an alert goes off, by all means put those things on a dashboard.

But when someone just says ‘we want to be able to see these numbers’ it’s often worth asking what they plan to do with them.

Re: Planning is for doing

#48

Post by [deleted] »

YokoZar wrote: post #22
bitwize wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rule for four-way stops is simple: Right-of-way is established in order of arrival at the intersection. First to arrive at the stop sign can go first, followed by the second, etc. Not everybody follows the rule, and technically they're breaking traffic laws by doing so. And you're right. I prefer roundabouts too, they're objectively safer. Massachusetts has a fair few roundabouts, but other parts of the country s…

There are other rules. Always yield to pedestrians. Two cars can sometimes go at the same time if they're not on a collision course. If pedestrians are blocking the person whose turn it is, you can go instead. Order is based on arrival time, unless there's a lot of cars then it's yield to the right if you're unsure. These rules combine in such a way that it's genuinely unclear who should go in some situations - the a…

[deleted]

Re: Planning is for doing

#49

Post by andrei_says_ »

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.…

Sociocracy decision making uses my favorite question of all times:

Is this good enough for now and safe enough to try?

Re: Planning is for doing

#50

Post by layer8 »

kkfx wrote: post #16
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.…

The issue came when people decide that "emergency" and "normal operations" should be the same. In an emergency such corner cutting approach might allow for quicker resolutions since in most cases emergencies happen in a relatively charted/pre-computed territory, in ordinary condition impede a proper development resulting in much more emergencies, and more and more larger/tough. Unfortunately too many fails to appreci…

The important thing is to make sure that it doesn’t fail silently fail or with unknown consequences (e.g. data corruption). So make sure that whenever something doesn’t work, it fails loudly and doesn’t proceed as if everything was okay.
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