Bulldozer00's Blog

I recently dug up and re-read the classic Parnas/Clement 1986 paper: “A Rational Design Process: How And Why To Fake It“. Despite the tendency of people to want to desperately believe the process of design is “rational“, it never is. The authors know there is no such thing as a sequential, rational design process where:

• There’s always a good reason behind each successive design decision.
• Each step taken can be shown to be the best way to get to a well defined goal.

The culprit that will always doom a rational design process is “learning“:

Many of the details only become known to us as we progress in the implementation (of a design). Some of the things that we learn invalidate our design and we must backtrack (multiple times during the process). The resulting design may be one that would not result from a rational design process. – Parnas/Clements

Since “learning“, in the form of going backwards to repair discovered mistakes, is a punishable offense in social command & control hierarchies where everyone is expected to know everything and constantly march forward, the best strategy is to cover up mistakes and fake a rational design process when the time comes to formally present a “finished” design to other stakeholders.

Even though it’s unobtainable, for some strange reason, Spock-like rationality is revered by most orgs. Thus, everyone in org-land plays the “fake-it” game, whether they know it or not. To expect the world to run on rationality is irrational.

Executives preach “evidence-based decision-making“, but in reality they practice “decision-based evidence-making“.