Outcome not decision

We are a scattered team, with some developers at user locations. We have some duplication of features, with different local ways of doing the same task. We discussed this, and agreed to converge the worst example in the next release, and also to talk to each other to produce a unified design in future.

After that meeting, one person wrote to me to ask if I could promise that in future we would take the necessary discussions and avoid local solutions. I wrote back saying no. I said that I could imagine a species in which, if today everyone agrees that whenever A happens they will do B, and tomorrow A happens, it reliably follows that everyone does B. However, that species is not Homo Sapiens.

There are real pressures on us that mean that the outcome we want will have to be fought for case by case.

I'm reading "Inventing Accuracy: A historical sociology of nuclear missile guidance" by Donald Mackenzie. He says "Policy is not 'decision', with that term's connotation of an anthropomorphic decision maker, but 'outcome'."

That seems like a crucial insight for leading a team. He also uses the term "heterogeneous engineering" for "the engineering of the social as well as the physical world", combining technical development of the product with developing the institutions and social processes that will create demand and support for it, and develop it in the desired direction.