It's only six paragraphs so you can't hope for much subtlety, but this is very fuzzy thinking. I always stress a hierarchy of Goals, Strategies, Objectives, an

It's only six paragraphs so you can't hope for much subtlety, but this is very fuzzy thinking. I always stress a hierarchy of Goals, Strategies, Objectives, and Tactics, which is a fundamental and well known way to tackle strategic thinking/planning. When you engage in fuzzy thinking, then it is easy to make the wrong decision. For example: "we must be agile". Well, no, that's not our goal. Our goal is "whatever", and agile might let us meet that goal, or it might hinder it. "Move fast and break things" will (hopefully) never be the motto of Boeing. So, simple, correct, fast. That conflates different things. It is never my goal that things be simple. A goal might be 'correctness' or 'don't kill people'. A way to achieve correctness is, for example, easily unit testable software, which is a strategy, the objective is a passing unit test, and a tactic might then be the code be simple (low cyclomatic software is easier to exhaustively test, for example). When you conflate various levels of this hierarchy bad decisions and religion ensure. "Code must be simple". "We must always be agile". "Everything must be documented". "functions must be < 10 lines long" You can see that these are not goals, but often chosen ways to get to your goal. The problem is, goals change, and strategies don't get you to the goals in some edge cases. Because you are focused only on strategies/tactics and haven't clearly articulated the goals you don't notice this and make bad decisions. For example, short functions are generally a good thing. But, sometimes it takes 50 lines to express a cohesive thought. Splitting that arbitrarily across many functions can just obscure intent, and leave the developer scrolling back and forth, which is proven to reduce comprehension and increase the likelihood of errors. In short, if you use these three criteria, in this order or any order, I don't think you will end up making very good decisions because you at best only implicitly have stated and understood the problems you are trying to solve and the interrelationships of how your strategies and tactics affect one another/