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Comment by brutusborn | Hacker News Reader

I think the reason this isn't done more often is that most decisions making is political in nature. Explicitly stating downsides provides opponents of "the plan" a greater opportunity to continue arguing for their side in bad-faith.

Presenting only the upside gives enough context to helps the team execute the plan.

Another aspect is management trying to hide the distasteful aspects of decision making (e.g. choosing an "inferior" technology because it requires the company to invest more in training its staff)

I wish this wasn't the case and I dream of being part of an org where upsides/downsides are always explicitly stated but I am yet to find one (outside of very small teams within larger orgs) where complex politics doesn't have an oversized influence on decision making.

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Trust is necessarily to work in groups.

I see too often companies giving individual bonuses on productivity, that creates a "if you fail I win" mentality. Punishing people for mistakes is also quite common. You end with colleagues that can't trust anybody, everything is a competition against the guy sitting at your side.

Punishment and reward systems make "office politics" toxic and a game for opportunists instead of a forum to get to the best decisions.

Experiencing this in a FAANG microcosm is what made me realize the same thing of the economy as a whole. When government (Latin for “control of the mind”) controls the incentives it never has to get its hands dirty accomplishing its goals. The economic reward means someone else will inevitably do it for them, even when that reward is something that’s literally worthless[0] except as an idea which much be mutually agreed upon. The very existence of billionaires is the exact same kind of individual bonus, but on a global scale.

[0] RE: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages... “Federal Reserve notes are not redeemable in gold, silver or any other commodity, and receive no backing by anything. This has been the case since 1933. The notes have no value for themselves, but for what they will buy. In another sense, because they are legal tender, Federal Reserve notes are "backed" by all the goods and services in the economy.”

> When government (Latin for “control of the mind”)

I don't think this is accurate. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/160026/does-the-...

Money is not "literally worthless"; the state guarantees that you can use them to pay your debts, by cancelling all debts that you pay using dollars, whether your creditor agrees to it or not.

And you might find the following interesting:

- Wikipedia entry for “groupthink“ and the ways of preventing it.

- The Israeli “10th man doctrine” and “Ipha mistabra”, as one technique (perhaps this is real, and not just a feature of the plot of world War Z).

Sources for your 2nd point since I was intrested:

https://www.quora.com/World-War-Z-2013-movie/World-War-Z-201...

https://jel.jewish-languages.org/words/1719

If you don't present the downside, you are betting your career that your coworkers don't know the downside or aren't willing to present it in order to take you down. There is a great story about this in In The Plex book, about an exec who sabotaged another by encouraging him to propose a project and then embarrassing him in the meeting with the founders.

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