One approach that I think is really valuable in the face of this is helping people to lose ASAP while there's still time to change. I think that was one of the

One approach that I think is really valuable in the face of this is helping people to lose ASAP while there's still time to change. I think that was one of the key insights that united the early Agile people, the ones who pioneered it before it turned into a certification/consulting scam. Releasing early and often to actual users enables a level of discipline and humility that's hard to achieve otherwise. I think this was taken further by the Lean Startup folks, where you were supposed to be explicit about your hypotheses and then construct tests to validate/invalidate them. E.g.: https://rulez.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/validation-board-lean-startup-rulez.pdf https://rulez.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/validation-board... I'm sorry it never caught on widely, but it has stuck with me. On any project I'm on, I structure the coding work such that as early as possible we can see if we are having the impact we aim for. That inevitably sucks early on as we put barely-adequate things in front of people and frequently get negative responses. But it really pays off over time, as you get to kill bad ideas early and use the savings to explore real solutions. Sadly, I don't think this approach scales, at least with current management culture. In the short term, managers and execs benefit a lot more from seeming right than from being wrong in ways that lead to them eventually being right.