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I've seen cases where 100+ people were required to attend multi-day meeting marathons to agree on the perfect sprint goal formulation, a negotiation held hostage by a few pedants that were never quite happy with the exact wording.

That's like 2000 man hours down the drain to produce a sentence I'm not even sure who is the intended audience for.




The flipside is seeing thousands of hours wasted building the wrong thing because people couldn't be bothered to communicate properly. "Getting the words right" turns out to be a fundamental step for producing successful software - not because the words themself are directly important, but because it's a reflection of a robust mental model of the problem.


To be clear, these wordings has no impact on what was to be built, that had already been decided at a separate set of meetings. This goal setting meeting was sheer process.

At some point, the cost of building not quite the right thing has to be weighed against the cost of spending literally millions deciding on what to build next.


There is a difference between what is perceived as effective communication and what is actually effective communication. More communication for the sheer sake of more communication almost never means more effective communication or coordination.


Honestly, it sounds like there will still be a few pedants who disagree with the phrasing of this new Commandment.

To me, what you described sounds like both Hell and entertaining Theater; Theater the first couple of times, Hell at 3+. It’s alternatively The Ninth Layer Of Hell if I have to provide input at any point for any reason.




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