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SpaceX
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NASA
СпутникиРНSpaceXРоскосмосNASA"I don't need a chart to tell me this is the right way to work." An executive said that in a room where someone had just put a chart on the screen. The chart showed that two years into the transformation, the numbers that were supposed to move hadn't. Delivery, quality, customer satisfaction, all roughly where they started. And the most senior person in the room waved it away. Not because the data was wrong. Because he was sure. Everyone nodded. The transformation rolled on, louder than before, and the chart nobody wanted to look at kept being right. That isn't a failure of intelligence. It's a failure of a much older kind. In Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth, the third rule a wizard learns is the one people break most often, usually right when they feel most justified: "Passion rules reason, for better or for worse." In the books it's a warning about decisions made in the grip of a strong feeling. Love, anger, fear, zeal. When passion takes the wheel, reason ends up in the back seat, and the choice that comes out is almost always worse than the one a calm mind would have made. Sometimes it's an obvious mistake. More often it's just not the best call, and it costs more than it should. And passion doesn't only bend the decision. It hides the bend from you, because while you're inside it, the feeling reads as certainty. Goodkind meant it as a warning to wizards. It works just as well as a warning to anyone with the conviction to push a decision through a room.Passion doesn't only live in the corner officeThe waved-away chart is the boardroom version. But the agile world runs on passion at every altitude, and at every altitude it switches off the same reasoning agile was built to protect. We celebrate the true believers and call the celebration culture. Here's the bill it quietly runs up. Take the Product Owner in love with the feature. Not just confident in it, in love with it. It was their idea, they pitched it, they can see it finished. Then discovery comes back lukewarm. Users shrug. The Product Owner doesn't kill it. They explain why the users didn't get it, line up another round, reframe the value, because letting go of the idea now feels like losing a part of themselves. Product vision became product religion somewhere back there, and nobody noticed the moment it crossed over. Take the agile evangelist. The coach or leader for whom agile is a calling, not a method. When results don't come, a method asks "is this working?" A calling asks "are people doing it properly?" So the answer to every disappointment is more framework, more ceremonies, more purity. The passion that's supposed to prove commitment to agile has quietly turned anti-empirical, because it now defends the framework instead of inspecting the outcome. Take the architecture holy war. Two senior engineers, both brilliant, both certain, fighting over the design. Technical passion is a gift, it's often the thing protecting quality. But somewhere in the third week of the argument it stopped being about the system and started being about who's right. Identity politics with better laptops. The decision that comes out the other side is the one the louder conviction won, not the one the evidence pointed to. And take transformation theatre at the top. Leaders genuinely excited about going agile, energy real, intentions good, who never touch the funding model, the org chart, or the approval chains that make agility structurally impossible. The passion is poured into the announcement and withheld from the system. Loud where it's cheap, silent where it would cost something. A Product Owner, a coach, two engineers, a leadership team. Different rooms, different altitudes, one mechanism. In every one of them, a strong feeling took the wheel and the evidence ended up in the back seat. And in every one of them, the feeling read as certainty from the inside.Conviction is not evidenceHere's what keeps getting confused, in all four rooms. Caring deeply about something is not the same as being right about it. You can be completely sincere about a feature, a framework, a design, a transformation, and completely wrong, and the fire tells you nothing about which. This is exactly where it hits fundamentals, because agile's whole proposition was reason over guesswork. Decide from evidence, not from how strongly someone feels. There's a name for the part passion runs over: Decisive Adaptation. It's the fundamental where you change direction based on what the evidence shows, the one where plans are bets, not vows. Passion turns the bet into a vow. Once you love the plan, the feature, the framework, the design, you stop weighing it. You start defending it. And it sits right next to Honest Inspection, the fundamental that asks for evidence to get more airtime than opinion. Passion is the loudest opinion in the room. It doesn't ask for airtime. It takes it. If you've followed this series, you'll see how the Third Rule holds up the first two. Wizard's First Rule said you believe a lie when you want it to be true, or fear it might be. Passion is what cranks the wanting and the fearing high enough that the lie starts to feel like loyalty. Wizard's Second Rule said the worst harm comes from the best intentions. Passion is what makes those intentions feel far too good to question. Feel strongly enough and you can't see the first two Rules working on you at all. That's the real trap. The stronger the conviction, the blinder the choice. Call it the passion premium. Every decision made in the grip of conviction costs more than the reasoned version would have, and usually returns less. You pay it in features shipped that nobody wanted, designs defended past the point of sense, reorganizations that didn't need to happen, and the slow exhaustion of mistaking how hard you're pushing for how far you're getting.Four signals the passion premium is being chargedIt looks the same whether you're watching a Product Owner, an architect, or a board. 1. The case for a big call is energy, not evidence. The pitch is momentum and how right it feels. Ask "what's the evidence?" and the room hears an attack on someone's commitment instead of a fair question. 2. The loudest care wins. Direction gets set by whoever feels most strongly or argues hardest, not by whoever brought the clearest evidence. The architecture war, the feature fight, the strategy call, all decided by volume standing in for validity. 3. Changing course feels like betrayal. Because people are emotionally attached to the choice, reversing it reads as disloyalty or failure. So the team clings to a passionate decision long after a calm one would have let it go. The bet has quietly become a vow. 4. The energy climbs while the results don't. The reorgs get bigger, the all-hands get louder, the feature gets one more round. Effort rises, evidence doesn't, and exhaustion gets mistaken for progress.One move, for whoever's about to decideBefore the next big call, at any altitude, ask the person championing it one question. What evidence would make you abandon this? Ask the Product Owner in love with the feature. Ask the engineer who's sure about the design. Ask the executive who's all-in on the transformation. If the honest answer is "nothing," you're not looking at a decision. You're looking at a passion, and passions make expensive bets. Don't let it commit anyone yet. Send it back for a cold case, argued by someone with no emotional stake, for and against, on evidence only. Then decide from that. The passion is fine. It just shouldn't be the thing that gets to decide. Before you commit to the next big move, ask one question. If we had no emotional investment in this at all, would the evidence still point us here? If the answer is "I don't know, but it feels right," you have your answer, and it isn't agile. It's a feeling someone agreed to stop questioning. Agile asked you to reason from evidence. Somewhere along the way the movement taught people to feel strongly instead, and called that maturity. But the fundamental under every good decision, Honest Inspection, runs on evidence, and passion is the most respectable way there is to switch it off. The teams that understand this haven't stopped caring. They've just stopped letting the caring make the call. The Rule doesn't care whether you believe it. That's what makes it a Rule. Take this Rule into your next big decision, a feature, a design, a transformation, and ask: are we choosing this because the evidence points here, or because it feels right to the people who care the most? If this Rule cut close, pass the blade on. Share.
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| # | Наименование новости | Тональность | Информативность | Дата публикации |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Your Agile Transformation is a Lie You Wanted to Be True | -6 | 4 | 25-06-2026 |
| 2 | You Helped Your Teams Into Helplessness | -2 | 6 | 02-07-2026 |
| 3 | The Wizard's Rules: A Field Guide to How Your Organization Lies to Itself | -2 | 6 | 18-06-2026 |
| 4 | Wird Product-Ownership zum Flaschenhals im KI-Zeitalter? Warum viele Product-Owner schlecht priorisieren, warum KI das sichtbar macht und 10 Werkzeuge, um besser zu entscheiden | 0 | 7 | 07-07-2026 |
| 5 | Prioritizing Is the Hardest Thing Your Brain Does. Your Calendar Treats It Like the Easiest. | 0 | 5 | 05-07-2026 |
| 6 | Ordering the Product Backlog with RICE: From Opinion to Evidence | 0 | 5 | 09-07-2026 |
| 7 | From Chaos to Control, Part 5 - Goal | 2 | 6 | 02-07-2026 |
| 8 | Discovery Is De-Risking, Not Requirements Gathering | 0 | 6 | 04-07-2026 |
| 9 | Alles ist relativ – vor allem in der Softwareentwicklung | 0 | 5 | 30-06-2026 |
| 10 | A TAIL of Woe - Improving Medical Device Developmenrt | 0 | 5 | 29-06-2026 |