How things got that way

08/18/2006

Jerry Weinberg has often said that things are always the way they are because they got that way.

While obvious, it’s not a tautology—too often we look at things that have become a disaster and assume it happened overnight. It didn’t. Many forces build up over time to produce a disaster, but we typically don’t recognize the components until they’ve all come together and disaster has struck.

Take for example the $170 Million dollars lost on a failed project at the FBI. Yup, the FBI, in an effort to save us all from the ravages of terrorism, puked $170M on a failed software project.

All the signs were there, but no one heeded the warnings, and now it’s a front-page disaster. The same, of course, goes for the current rash of violence in the middle east and terrorist attacks in general. These things don’t happen overnight. The build up over time, from a variety of identifiable (and even preventable) causes. Every small event feeds into the larger system, and then bang.

As the fortune cookie suggests, “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”

Maybe we should.