[ElevenLathe]

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.

Once you notice this pattern (it's clearer in outage situations where moments matter), you frequently catch people (including yourself, if you're honest) seeking information that they don't even /plan/ to use as an input to some decision or action. In other words, there is no conceivable future where the answer to some proposed question would have an effect on their actions. If you find such a situation, you can at minimum remove answering that question from the critical path, and possibly just never bother finding the answer at all.

That doesn't mean that having such information is bad, just that we should think of the cost of gathering suit against its likelihood of mattering in terms of our actions. In fact, possibly one of the central purposes of IT broadly is to lower the cost of answering such questions, so that we can afford to ask more of them.

[exmadscientist]

> 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.

[infogulch]

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 later when we have more information.

[Cerium]

The optimal time to make a decision is the moment before it hits the critical path. Where I work we make this actionable by saying to defer decisions and pull forward unknowns.

[mathgorges]

100% agree with this. You never know what you’ll know in the future :)

The phrase “delay the decision to the last responsible moment” is my favorite mantra about this.

[Cerium]

Oh, I like that phrasing. Thanks for sharing.

[blowski]

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.

[ozim]

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.

[jameshart]

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?

[rocqua]

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.

[jameshart]

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.

[taneq]

A related principle is that often you’re really not blocked on things you think you’re blocked on. Waiting on that part / component / email response? Pretend you just got it. Chances are the first thing, or even first few things, you’d do didn’t require the thing you were waiting for.

[tempodox]

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.

[kkfx]

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 appreciate complexity so "if something work" it must work anytime, at any scale, for any scenarios and so on. Teaching complexity IME generally fail.

[layer8]

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.

[spaetzleesser]

“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?"”

I like to ask this too. This question is also very useful in a medical context. They often order tests where the outcome doesn’t really matter for the path forward.

[andrei_says_]

Sociocracy decision making uses my favorite question of all times:

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

[zwkrt]

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?

[ElevenLathe]

I think we always take some of it home. You can try all you like to keep your work and private lives separate but there will always be some spillover. Plus, no matter what you do, there is always in theory some dollar value attached even to your free time, or some limitation on the amount of time off you can take, which means that you really do have to be goal-oriented about taking a vacation, spending time with family and friends, practicing an instrument, etc. If you're not, it might not happen at all.

I don't know what the answer is but I agree that market-worship is bad and makes all of us involved in market-driven work (i.e. basically everyone) a little less compassionate.