The Folly of Promises Before Practicalities

When Reality Meets Design

In a moment of lucid piquancy, we have come to realise that reality has a way of touching realism in ways so radically unexpected that a rethink is required. As I have written elsewhere, in my earlier posts on our laptop remediation activity, the theory and the terrain are rarely the same country.

I say this whilst appreciating the amount of work that has gone into crafting a "perfect" solution, only to find it unsuitable, or challenged by inconvenient situations that threaten the very premises we thought had accounted for everything.

Where Solutions Are Tested

When a solution is put to the test in a real-world setting, you find the gaps in your thinking first; then you discover the ways in which the common, the outlier, the exceptional, or the impossible render your solution inadequate.

In our case, a deployment to just 0.2% of the cohort revealed issues that will remain insurmountable until we have better data. Only then can we skew the solution towards those we can genuinely help.

What unsettles me is the arithmetic of it. If we are already encountering this many blockers with so tiny a group of testers, then the impact on the full 100%, had this gone out early, would have been more than a disaster; it would have been an overwhelming failure of insight and foresight, the very faculties none of us can afford to lack.

An AI-generated infographic on the blog content. (Click to enlarge.)

I remember a comment I made in an earlier blog: "we were working with architects whose confidence outpaced their familiarity with the environment in which their solution was meant to run." To use a colloquialism, the rubber has hit the tarmac and the tacks are flying.

The Value of Restraint

Within this morass lies the urgency to get the solution out, yet our initial reviews and feedback suggest that my reticence has forestalled a catastrophe. Restraint, however, never receives the honour it so well deserves.

We are at an impasse: how do we find normalisation amidst this chaos, so that a subset of the solution's settings can go out to the largest majority whilst we decide how to handle the difficult ones, and whether it is even worth our while to tackle them?

Promise Before Practicality

The biggest failing of this whole exercise is that promises were made long before the practicalities were addressed. The architects gave their assurances to the business before ever consulting the implementors on whether those ideas could be delivered, and that ordering, the pledge preceding feasibility, is where the trouble was seeded.

If you are not seeing through the glass clearly, you should not be gambling on the reality of the little you can see.

So, we do the only honest thing left to us: we wait for the data first, because only the data can tell us who we are truly able to help, and we promise nothing until it does.

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