Difficult Choices

When dealing with a large technical project, there are a huge number of decisions that constantly need to be made. Some of them are quite simple. You can pick the intuitive or obvious answer.

Some of them are incredibly difficult. Pick correctly and things will more or less work out. Pick badly and your problems will only get worse.

The most difficult choices are always between picking an okay short-term fix, or choosing what is often referred to as “the right thing”. In that second case, you will spend the time to really solve the problem correctly.

If you choose the short-term fix then rather immediately something will be done and the problem will appear to go away. You can claim success, then move on to other problems.

If you do "the right thing” then it is a long-term play. For the short term, things will take longer, but you are hoping to make it up later.

The problem is that the benefits in the future are often things that will now “not happen” to slow you down anymore. So, it’s the ‘lack’ of other later problems that you are getting, which is a bit misleading.

To understand what those other problems will be, you probably have had to not only live through them in the past but also have accepted them as consequences of some other choice and then tried to learn from them. If you haven’t experienced them directly for yourself, the most common behavior is to significantly undervalue them, so they don’t seem like a big deal. Or as they like to say “hindsight is 20/20”.

So, it’s not surprising that if someone is facing a relatively new choice between making a problem quickly go away or delaying things a bit in order to not face other problems down the road, they will usually choose the first path. Really, why not? Without any prior experience, choosing the second path just seems irrational. If you did that for everything, you’d never get anything done.

In the case where the short-term fix spawns other problems, above say a 2 to 1 margin so it is basically "do it now" or "do twice the amount of work later", then it’s a fairly high cost to cope with. In many cases though, it is often "spend a week now", or "lose 1 day every few weeks". So it takes nearly 3 months for the long-term fix to finally pay off. But it is worth it because it is endlessly reoccurring and the original cost is likely getting worse too.

So we can see that 1 or 2 of these poor choices can hurt a little. But they are also a slippery slope in that making a few of them often leads to making more and more of them. And since they can act as multipliers to each other then they might combine together to become exponential. Or put another way, just when you thought you were doing really well and solving all of your problems, the consequences of doing it all too quickly explode.

It is probably a general property of any complexity. The more things get complicated, the more you will face difficult choices, and the more expensive the tradeoff between short and long-term will become. You don’t see this in simple problems, mostly because the penalties are trivial. The only real mitigation against this is prior experience, in that it may force a person to do the right thing even when it seems to be less rational in comparison to any of the short-term options. Which, I think we commonly refer to as 'wisdom'.