Never Volunteer

US Army survival rule. They don't ask for volunteers unless it's for something particularly nasty.

All decisions must be defensible. Including the one to order you to do something risky. Make them order you.

The trouble here is the word "they". If you're defending a business in which you have equity, then by gum you're only working in your own interests by volunteering.

If instead you're a consultant serving a client, then by gum you need to service that client if you expect to maintain the relationship and get a decent reference.

Only if you are a slave - if you've been coerced, drafted, threatened with poverty, or roped in by other non-consensual means - only then is it perhaps in your interests to NeverVolunteer. And even then you may be wiser to think about ways out.

Of course, in the case that you are a slave, perhaps you should CreateLivableAlternativesToWageSlavery.

What means "risky" here? Is it "risky" in the sense of risking a smaller quarterly profit? Or "risky" in the sense of risking being eaten by bug-eyed monsters? In the latter sense, it is indeed advisable to NeverVolunteer.

It might be interesting to check out http://www.heretical.com/games/vdilemma.html

They discuss the "Volunteer's Dilemma". It's somewhat like PrisonersDilemma. There are several players (who can't discuss beforehand). Each must independently decide whether to "volunteer". If NO ONE volunteers, everyone loses. But as long as SOME other person will take up the task, it's to your advantage to sit back. Interestingly, this appears to have LOTS of parallels.

There was an interesting psych study along these lines. There is one "victim" and several "bystanders". Each of the bystanders individually would be perfectly capable of helping the victim, but since they NeverVolunteer, none of them do. This happens in real life situations. If you are the victim and want help, what you need to do is to pick one person from the bystanders and say to them specifically you help me. If you just do "somebody help me" it won't work. --AndyPierce

Reminds me of something I saw on television. A man lay down on a sidewalk in a big city, pretending to have collapsed. Almost no one stopped to help. When he repeated this experiment in a village, nearly everyone who passed him stopped to see if he was all right. -- DavidBrantley

They say that when you are ready to do CPR the first thing you should do is pick one person from the crowd and make them responsible for calling 911.

Funny thing about consulting and teaching. We know it is better when people volunteer, but it is hard to get people to volunteer from a group. Sometimes you just have to ask people directly. I wrote up something that followed from this dilemma in a little article: http://www.objectmentor.com/publications/AgileWorkflow.pdf

One thing that I notice is that people do volunteer much more when they gel as a team, when they are comfortable with each other.

-- MichaelFeathers