202408220851 Willful ignorance of reality in organizations

In organizations, there's a tendency for people at higher levels or in roles further removed from the "doing" of a project to be vague to the point of harm. Some (bad) managers want something done and want other people to deal with how that gets done or indeed whether or not it's even possible to do it.

[I]t boils down to a psychological distance from the fact that true reality exists, and that someone lower status has to handle it.¹

I see this frequently in the interactions between (bad) product managers and engineers. The PM has an idea or a requirement to build something that they don't inspect closely or take the time to understand the reality of that idea. They don't understand what it would take to build it, what it would feel like to use, or whether it's a good idea once faced with all the edge cases involved. The idea of doing all that work is either too challenging or demeaning to these bad actors and it ends up falling on the individual contributor who actually produces the work output to solve these problems.

I've alternatively called this "compression of reality" and "where the rubber meets the road" to show that engineers don't have the luxury to hand wave or be vague when writing code. They have to specify — in exacting detail! — how it all works.

This can also manifest as a compete disconnect between what happened in reality and what an organization or its members tell itself. People do not want to be confronted with their failures, especially in a public setting. Something being on a roadmap doesn’t mean it was done. Something being completed doesn’t mean it was good or successful. 202503301254 The map is not the territory. And yet we frequently see people who claim a massive failure of a project as a success instead. This can only be interpreted as a willful ignorance of reality.