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While I appreciate my posts being defended by other people, my intention was not to call anyone condescending. I merely wanted to suggest that any agile organis

by dtx1 4y ago

While I appreciate my posts being defended by other people, my intention was not to call anyone condescending. I merely wanted to suggest that any agile organisation should strive to learn from each other and find better ways to deal with bad/low priority ideas than make people feel warm and fuzzy inside while ignoring their input. Though the use of the wording "idiot pacifier" was perhaps a bit too strong and distracted from the intended meaning.

rcme 4y ago
But who is the arbiter of good ideas? This is kind of a precision / recall problem. Do you want every idea offered to be good, or do you want to get every good idea out of your team, even if that means tolerating some bad ideas? That's not to say we shouldn't strive to have better ideas overall, but the ideation process itself is valuable, even if it's unlikely to produce solely good ideas.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  "Tolerating" and "keeping around forever next to the good ideas" are different things. You can say no without stifling future input.
  - rcme 4y ago
    What is the downside of keeping the "bad" ideas around forever other than you find it annoying? My point is that people only care that the backlog grows indefinitely because it disagrees with their sense of order. This is the type of thing an analytic thinker tends to care about, but the size of the backlog queue doesn't really have any meaningful impact on anything. I'm not sure you can say no without stifling future input, or if you can it requires a lot of tact. People don't like rejection. Being rejected makes them less likely to try again in the future.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      The problem isn't keeping them, the problem is mixing them with the good ideas that are low priority. Then you have to mentally re-categorize them every time you go through the list, and if you actually start to shrink the backlog then they come back to cause problems, like making you still have to reject them or someone wasting their time implementing them.
- dtx1 4y ago
  That's obviously all context dependent and in any ideation/brainstorming process it's valuable to have a free flow of ideas but there's a necessary filtering process afterwards. David Allen writes in Detail about this in Getting Things Done, specifically in the chapters of the natural planning process. Now with regards to the backlog, if a team can develop common criteria for high value/high priority tasks and learn to reject low value/low priority tasks than they can more effectively manage their backlog and time.

by dtx1 4y ago

rcme 4y ago

But who is the arbiter of good ideas? This is kind of a precision / recall problem. Do you want every idea offered to be good, or do you want to get every good idea out of your team, even if that means tolerating some bad ideas? That's not to say we shouldn't strive to have better ideas overall, but the ideation process itself is valuable, even if it's unlikely to produce solely good ideas.

Dylan16807 4y ago
"Tolerating" and "keeping around forever next to the good ideas" are different things. You can say no without stifling future input.
- rcme 4y ago
  What is the downside of keeping the "bad" ideas around forever other than you find it annoying? My point is that people only care that the backlog grows indefinitely because it disagrees with their sense of order. This is the type of thing an analytic thinker tends to care about, but the size of the backlog queue doesn't really have any meaningful impact on anything. I'm not sure you can say no without stifling future input, or if you can it requires a lot of tact. People don't like rejection. Being rejected makes them less likely to try again in the future.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    The problem isn't keeping them, the problem is mixing them with the good ideas that are low priority. Then you have to mentally re-categorize them every time you go through the list, and if you actually start to shrink the backlog then they come back to cause problems, like making you still have to reject them or someone wasting their time implementing them.
dtx1 4y ago
That's obviously all context dependent and in any ideation/brainstorming process it's valuable to have a free flow of ideas but there's a necessary filtering process afterwards. David Allen writes in Detail about this in Getting Things Done, specifically in the chapters of the natural planning process. Now with regards to the backlog, if a team can develop common criteria for high value/high priority tasks and learn to reject low value/low priority tasks than they can more effectively manage their backlog and time.