Intent vs. Impact
September 17, 2020
You may have heard variants of the expression “Impact is more important than intent” before and had trouble understanding how to act on that, so here’s some analogies for programmers that might help:
- Intent is rewriting the code to make it “cleaner”
- Impact is the hundreds of brand new bugs you introduced by not taking a risk-managed approach to your rewrite
- Intent is to test a quick thing on your staging environment
- Imapct is to bring down prod for six hours because you didn’t set the right configuration
In both of these cases, your good intentions don’t erase the impact. Your intentions might add some additional context to the discussion, but they don’t undo the fact that prod was down or a bunch of people had to fix a bunch of bugs.
It’s that simple! We mess up and our impact doesn’t represent what we intended. That happens! But you can’t make the fallout just go away by saying “but what I meant was…”