Dave Farley’s talk on dealing with accidental and essential complexities made me reflect on an interesting psychological phenomenon: we often prefer to add rather than subtract.
This seem to be the reason for oh-so-many widespread dysfunctions: from recruiting more staff to “meet project deadlines”, to scheduling additional meetings for “better process oversight”, from increasing reporting or metrics for “clearer process visualization”, to implementing more quality assessments for “better quality assurance”.
It also seems that micromanagement is triggered by this phenomena: managers see the complexity increasing and believe that adding more control will help dealing with this complexity:
some managers will respond to complexity by increasing levels of control over team members and workplace practices (Chuang, Kendra, & Craft, 2011). Managers with such controlling behaviors are sometimes known as micromanagers, especially when the control they wield over staff is preoccupied with the minutiae or minor details of day-to-day workplace operations (White, 2010)
Certainly, adding more control yields less results.
Often, when confronted with a problem, our instinct is to devise a solution to that specific issue, overlooking things which caused the problem. Instead of merely addressing the symptom, perhaps we should consider restructuring the entire system to prevent the issue from arising initially.
This perspective is why I appreciate CI/CD and TBD: rather than merely addressing the challenges of extensive merges, we eliminate the root of the problem.