> 'Sometimes pulling numbers out of your arse and using them to make a decision is better than pulling a decision out of your arse'
Agreed! Leaving the pseudoscience example aside - since there are strong emotions involved - we can clearly see that it is indeed useful and necessary to take decisions under uncertain/incomplete information. This is advantageous whenever the cost of inaction is expected to exceed the cost of backtracking a less than perfect decision, which often is the case.
Let's say... project management. IF you take the time to find out that your project requires 100 tasks, 30 of which lay in your critical path; you can argue if each task will take one day or one week to complete, and you can debate whether adding a 3rd or 4th member to the team will significantly speed up the completion date or not. But you will definitevely be in better shape than if your PM just cook up some 5-page-spec overnight and commited to have it running in beta test by the end of the month before even anouncing it to the team...
Which itself will be better than having all your potential contracts snatched by competitors that never do any estimation at all but are very good at pulling themselves out of tarpits of their own making.
Agreed! Leaving the pseudoscience example aside - since there are strong emotions involved - we can clearly see that it is indeed useful and necessary to take decisions under uncertain/incomplete information. This is advantageous whenever the cost of inaction is expected to exceed the cost of backtracking a less than perfect decision, which often is the case.
Let's say... project management. IF you take the time to find out that your project requires 100 tasks, 30 of which lay in your critical path; you can argue if each task will take one day or one week to complete, and you can debate whether adding a 3rd or 4th member to the team will significantly speed up the completion date or not. But you will definitevely be in better shape than if your PM just cook up some 5-page-spec overnight and commited to have it running in beta test by the end of the month before even anouncing it to the team...
Which itself will be better than having all your potential contracts snatched by competitors that never do any estimation at all but are very good at pulling themselves out of tarpits of their own making.