What can marriage teach us about system design and thinking

The disciple wanted to understand what marriage is and went to his teacher. Like always, instead of giving a straight answer, the teacher asked the disciple to bring him the BEST walking stick.

Confused but not to question the teacher, the disciple set out for the jungle. It was a lucky day, and he found some good sticks. Excited and hopeful to find even better, he continued to explore further.

The desire for a little more is dangerous!! The evening dawned but he couldn’t decide and had to return empty handed.
Sad frustrated and angry, he narrated the whole story to the teacher.
As always happens, the teacher remained calm and asked the disciple to try again the very next day.
This time the disciple was quite decisive. Without losing any time, he picked up the first stick he found and returned.

It is not important what lessons the disciple learnt about marriages but what this experience teaches us about system design and thinking.

1. There will always be something(tool/tech/platform) better out there. Considerable effort, time and money is spent to find the BEST without being clear on the definition of best. A while ago, In the name of best deal, a client procurement team took one year to buy a GPU machine.

2. When hard-pressed for time, effort and Money, the immediacy takes precedence over long term impact.

3. Most of the system/design complexity stems from the “Extreme” decisions models. One of the clients took more than a year to decide between build and buy? How about buy + customize, which well, most of the time is the ground reality.

There are other comparable behaviors as well

4. Compromise is a necessary part of any successful marriage.
COMPROMISE is a superpower. It is not about giving up but ACCEPTANCE. It is hard to imagine a successful system change without stakeholders ready to compromise their current process + tool + ways of working.

5. Trust and confidence take time to build. Like marriage, a system requires continuous investment of attention, effort, and time.

6. Accepting the fact that problems will be an integral part helps in addressing them without causing permanent damage.

These posts are my attempt to share the WIP post and update them as I understand more.

If you like the post, a clap would be quite encouraging.