[quietbritishjim]

I think we can be a bit less cynical about this behaviour, at least in some cases.

Perhaps a fresh pair of eyes is always going to notice a bunch of potential changes, which would improve things from their subjective point of view. But humans are notoriously bad at absolute scales (see Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman) so it's hard for us to decide "I can see a bunch of issues but they're all below the threshold for changing". The top of the scale is always what is most important out whatever issues are left. Adding the duck reshapes the scale so all those other things seem (correctly) trivial in comparison.

To put it another way, if the deadline is tight and the program kept crashing, maybe they wouldn't have even asked to remove the duck! The scale would have changed again, and the bit with the duck on it would have been compressed below the threshold.

[steveBK123]

I think that's a really great way to put it, but also not something the majority of leaders (or people in general) are capable of. Nothing is ever perfect, everyone has a different opinion/view, at some point you need to wrap up a work product and move on.

I found with a former manager the creation of project plans was absolutely hell because of this. Arguably project plans are not something directly deliverable to a stakeholder or with a firm deadline. Sort of like politics in academia, the lower the stakes the worst the battles.

So he would spin through 20 iterations of expressing his discontents with the current plan.

Typical feedback was what he didn't like / was wrong, rather than what he actually desired to see. Sort of like a very hands off editor who doesn't want to write the book for the author.

Often times midway through he would be Don Quixote'ing items in the plan that were added because of his earlier feedback.

[moate]

>>Don Quixote'ing

I realize there is no way to say this without sounding like an absolute fucking dork, and this may be a syntaxial choice you're making, but the phrase is "tilting at windmills".

I regularly say "irregardlessly" because it's fun and I know better and if that's what you're doing here I love it and it's amazing, but if not you've got a new phrase in your kit.

[notpachet]

> I realize there is no way to say this without sounding like an absolute fucking dork

I don't think you needed this caveat. I appreciated being reminded of the phrase.