True story: I had a one-slide internal presentation I made at Moz, that read "people will say and do and believe literally any crazy bullshit if the only alternative they can see is to feel powerless over something they care about."
One keenly-felt personal failure of my time there was that l could never convince the org that this is not just a truth, but a strategy. So now, people who care a lot about Mozilla have been made to feel powerless a lot in the last decade.
I have a suspicion that idea of "surprise and delight" has poisoned the world of technical comms, especially when it comes to "products" that people depend on, especially when it comes to the infrastructure of people's lives.
There's no world where anyone is delighted if their plumbing, or oven, or cane or wheelchair or elevator or blender or brakes or or or surprises them. None. Consistency and reliability is everything.
The failure mode of "surprise and delight" is "startled and terrified."
@mhoye So is "the failure mode of 'clever' is 'asshole'" a corollary of this, or is this a corollary of that?
mhoye
Fear and Tooting in Las Vegas