Are we becoming too focused on doing?

At least DO SOMETHING! DO! Don’t think, don’t hope, do! At least you can come off and say ‘I did this, I shepherded, I played on. At least I did something
John Kennedy.

The following clip shows some of Australian Rules Football’s finest motivators, including a snippet of the speech from John Kennedy as quoted above.

Something has dawned on me today. For years I’ve been focused on doing. I beat myself up for the times when I’m creating peripheral stuff and not actually doing. Methodologies like Agile have sprung up to ensure we are producing more doing. Microservices are similarly all about minimising overhead to ensure more doing. MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) and start-up thinking are also framed about more doing.

In the context of sport, it’s also all about doing. Making a block, kicking a ball, hitting a ball, making a run, etc. But all of those actions are transient. Once the activity is done, there’s no future cost (in most cases*).

In the context of OSS and tech in general, our actions are far from transient. All of that doing creates a residue – it gets used, maintained and supported for years afterwards.

With all of the effort expended on doing, are we losing track of the residual impacts (eg support costs)? With all the doing, are we moving away from the longer-term efficiency of thinking, hoping and un-doing? Is all the doing actually creating a spaghetti (the chess-board analogy) that we’ll never unravel?

Are we spawning a maelstrom, the butterfly effect from all of our doing?

* Except for rarer instances such a own-goals, violent acts, etc and the aggregated outcomes of actions such as field position.

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