There are many implications involved with ignoring the data or choosing to overlook the outcome knowledge at one’s disposal. However, we often punish bad outcomes without truly understanding the bad decisions that led to them. See the story of Husband E. Kimmel, Commander in Chief of the United States Fleet during the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, who was summarily relieved of his command ten days later. Fischoff wrote of experiments conducted in which subjects were asked to judge historical events that, “a past which is inordinately barren of surprises provides an inordinately weak test of the hypotheses applied to it (Popper, 1965). The judge who perceives a relatively surprise-free past may feel little compulsion to change the hypotheses which guided him in viewing that past. Thus, the very outcome knowledge which gives him the feeling that he understands what the past was all about may prevent him from learning anything from it.” (Fischhoff, 1974). Something to consider as we read Lynda Bourne’s Beware the Dangers of Technical Debt.
Fischhoff, B. (1974). Hindsight-foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty. PsycEXTRA Dataset, 1-29. doi:10.1037/e459202004-001
From Voices on Project Management:
By Lynda Bourne
Have you ever experienced technical debt on a project? As the debt builds up, everything looks good from the outside. However, when the crunch comes and that debt has to be repaid, a major reversal in fortune can occur.
Technical debt refers to the costs of having to go bac…
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