“Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream.” —W. S. Gilbert, in "HMS Pinafore"
This little phrase from Pinafore, from Little Buttercup, who is just a bumboat woman, is telling in our world of toss off agile platitudes. We as listeners overlook, and even dismiss or sometimes even despise, truths that are in plain sight, especially when they seem to strike at cherished beliefs and habits. This is usually the start on the path to project failure.
People want to believe. They want to believe that projects can be managed with simple ideas, be broken down into bite-sized chunks, little formal effort, self-organizing and even self-directed groups of people and just let the outcomes emerge as we go along - all will turn out alright. But few of these conjectured approaches to managing other people's money in the presence of uncertainty are based on any principles, let alone established practices and processes - as Alistair Cockburn suggests - A Hoax.
A Hoax in the dictionary sense of the term involves getting other people to accept as genuine something false and often preposterous.
While the conjecture that you can make decisions with other people's money in the presence of uncertainty without estimating the impact of that decision is not done with malice, it appears to be done without an understanding of the principles of probabilistic decision making and the microeconomics of decision making in the presence of uncertainty.
While you may ignore economics, it won’t ignore you. —Don Reinertsen. Principles of Product Development Flow
