Iterative Building and Decision Making
Imagine you’re driving a dirt road and you come to a fork. Which way do you go, left or right?
This decision is much easier to make if you’ve been traveling that road for the last hour and you’re sitting there in your truck facing the reality of the decision. You can see the level of wear in each path based on previous treks by others, you know the current weather, you can see how much you fuel you have left (both you and the vehicle). So many factors based on your previous actions have led you to this point and will inform your next decision.
Contrast that with a situation where you’re sitting in an air conditioned room with a map in front of you and you’re trying to decide what you will do when you get to that fork in the road.
The context of that decision making is everything.
Which leads me to Robin’s comment[1]:
building should be hard, decisions should be easy
I think decisions are easy when they’re informed by a parallel, in-process building — a process of “creative selection”, i.e. iterative, evolutionary decision making.
You build a little, hit a fork in the road, and make a decision. Then build a little more, use it, realize “nope that’s not right”, so you backtrack to the fork in the road and go the other direction. Then you build a little more and confront the next decision.
Building can be a form of navigating, e.g. you build where you want to go. But it can also be a form of way finding: you build to realize where you want to go. Nothing informs decision making like building the “wrong” thing.
And if you’re building and making decisions in small, continuous, iterative ways, there’s little cost to making a bad decision because you can always backtrack and make an even better decision knowing with surety that the other fork in the road is not where you wanted to go.
Want to bring consensus and alignment to the foreground? Have a process that surfaces evolutionary, iterative building and intertwined decision making.
If everyone can see the whole, they won’t ask why it was built a certain way. They’ll see all the ways you built then backtracked, all the ways that didn’t work. And the same obviousness in your decision making that’s clear to you, will be clear and obvious to everyone else.