That's a cool conceptual framework but like all conceptual frameworks it's meant as a simple, immediate rule of thumb, not a theory of how engineering managemen

That's a cool conceptual framework but like all conceptual frameworks it's meant as a simple, immediate rule of thumb, not a theory of how engineering management works. In practice, the last three Ds depend heavily on familiarity with the first one, as they ultimately boil down to steering it at (team) scale. Without it, you're going to decide the wrong thing for what your team needs to do, delegate the wrong things to people who can't do them, and ultimately design an organisation that can't do shit. Actually doing it isn't the only way to attain that sort of familiarity but for lots of people it's the only one that works. For them it's anything but the least important type of action a leader can do. Once they stop doing it at all, the clock of knowledge obsolescence starts ticking and all the other Ds atrite, as they inevitably end up deciding, delegating and designing based on yesterday's realities.