[pbronez]

That’s a great observation. I’m hitting the same thing… yesterday’s hacks are today’s gospel.

My solution is decision documents. I write down the business problem, background on how we got here, my recommended solution, alternative solutions with discussion about their relative strengths and weaknesses, and finally and executive summary that states the whole affirmative recommendation in half a page.

Then I send that doc to the business owners to review and critique. I meet with them and chase down ground truth. Yes it works like this NOW but what SHOULD it be?

We iterate until everyone is excited about the revision, then we implement.

[randallsquared]

There are two observations I've seen in practice with decision documents: the first is that people want to consume the bare minimum before getting started, so such docs have to be very carefully written to surface the most important decision(s) early, or otherwise call them out for quick access. This often gets lost as word count grows and becomes a metric.

The second is that excitement typically falls with each iteration, even while everyone agrees that each is better than the previous. Excitement follows more strongly from newness than rightness.

[thaumasiotes]

Eventually you'll run into a decision that was made for one set of reasons but succeeded for completely different reasons. A decision document can't help there; it can only tell you why the decision was made.

That is the nature of evolutionary processes and it's the reason people (and animals; you can find plenty of work on e.g. "superstition in chickens") are reluctant to change working systems.