Waterfall Syndrome

You've learned through trial and error to do something complex and difficult, like developing a large software product with good quality. You want to teach others how to do it, but you pretty soon find out that teaching it is now more complex than doing it. So what do you do?

You make some simple models to get some core ideas across. You are oversimplifying reality for the purpose of conveying information. Your models cannot be followed literally. They were never intended to.

Sooner or later, someone comes along and insists on applying your models literally. Whether or not they succeed is irrelevant. They are looking for something to believe in, and now they've found it. But that's not all. These folks are not happy unless they are forcing other people to "do it right".

This leads to an oppressed class of otherwise bright individuals who are under intense pressure to make misapplied wisdom pan out under schedule pressure. This oppression leads to anger in the oppressed, and anger being a primitive emotion, is not too selective in its target.

Actually, it's easier to be angry at an inert model than it is to be angry at some bastard holding your income over your head. Hence a whole culture grows around hating the models that a misinformed management embraced for god knows what reason.

What you have here is WaterfallSyndrome. At its core was a failure to tolerate the complexities that are really there, to deal with them, to know the pain of knowing you'll never be finished battling complexity.

The antidote, should you wish to be free of this syndrome, is to see the model for what value it offers, and leave off there. If there's residual anger, consider that beating a model senseless won't change the model at all, and except for momentary energy expenditure, won't change you either.

--WaldenMathews

Great observations! See also ThreeLevelsOfAudience. -- JeffMantei