[hinkley]

PA Yeomans, the 'other' father of permaculture, had a checklist he called the Scale of Permanence. It's a sort of priority list for irreversible decisions, and is helpful for figuring out if you're expending energy on something that's easy to change later, or rashly deciding on something that is going to be difficult or infeasible to change later.

In a system that favors watching first and acting at the last responsible moment, this is in someways both a counterweight and an anchor for analysis.

There are some ways in which systems thinking is the same no matter what domain you're looking at, and to some extent the ways in which they are different have more to do with lack/lag in cross-domain communication rather than any intrinsic distinctions between the domains. There is probably a Scale of Permanence for creating a business, it's just not called that or nobody has compiled a canonical list from the available sources.

[AlbertCory]

I'd like to read more on this.

I'd also like something much more difficult to estimate: Scale of Importance.

You have some sloppy but readable code in a unit test vs. sloppy and unreadable code in a tight loop in a production module. Which one is more important?

[astrange]

> PA Yeomans, the 'other' father of permaculture, had a checklist he called the Scale of Permanence.

What an interesting case of nominative determinism.