A Perspective Change

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It is just another day like many others before and hopefully more to expect. Yet the elderly speaks, “Thou shalt bestow swift victories of diminutive measure.” “Doth few befit and reap as gold.” These are hard to swallow pills. The truth is,

“Short cuts make long delays,” (beautifully) argued Pippin. - JRR Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

There is only a limited pool of low hanging fruit laying around. At some point, things will become so complex that it is almost impossible to deliver solutions quickly after some point of time. Even for those low hanging fruit if not executed thoughtfully the problem remains. They are now packaged differently, waiting for yet another half baked solution, rinse and repeat. It is a bug of sorts, like the infinite gold hack. It is unavoidable if the metric to optimize for is by quantity and visibility.

With the situation described, this article attempts to provide a different view to the unsolvable situation. It is not worthwhile to attempt to change the external environment, the invisible hand will always gamify the system. Assuming the reader’s intend is to actually improve the situation, a perspective change might help,

Play the long game, many of such solution won’t stay around long enough to proof their worthiness and warrant a long term planning for it

It is okay to take a short term L (yes, it is a zero sum game), seeing those delivering such solution take the Ws, promotions even. Usually these solutions goes in one of two ways,

• the solution quickly die off as it does not bring a long sustaining traction
  • the solution is indeed worthless
  • the solution has value, it is just introduced at the wrong timing
• the solution gains traction (and haunts the originator perhaps)
  • the originator is capable of providing a robust solution
  • the originator is not capable of providing a robust solution

Two out of the four outcome works out just fine, but another two are where the opportunity lies. It is even worthwhile to influence others to test out ideas that one does not have the time to invest onto. Getting free labour and still retaining a 50% of chance to reap some benefit. Think about it, 50% is a high enough number, investment-wise. What is more important is having the capability and knowledge to actually deliver solutions.