Organisations spend a lot of time discussing technical solutions to issues that aren’t actually technical problems: they’re political problems – even if it’s ‘small p’ political problems.
You know the situation – someone, somewhere, needs to make a non-technical decision first, to then enable a useful technical discussion. Policy and political choices need to be made, and then you can move onto the technical solutions needed to deliver these choices.
But we avoid recognising this problem, and focus on a false challenge instead – all the possible technical solutions and approaches – because we’d rather discuss them than the fact that a political decision is needed – and usually that’s not a decision we get to make (or influence).
You’ll never identify a technical solution that lets you avoid making a political decision.
One of the key takeaways from my Strata presentation on lessons learned from the Cancer Innovation Challenge.
https://conferences.oreilly.com/strata/strata-eu-2018/public/schedule/detail/65445.html