Avoiding clusterfucks
I stumbled on this interesting article earlier via Mathew’s (With Associates) new blog*
Clusterfuck is military slang for “a chaotic situation where everything seems to go wrong. It is often caused by incompetence, communication failure, or a complex environment”. We use it fairly specifically to mean communications failure caused by too many people in charge of, or weighing in on, a particular thing.
It’s great to see someone blogging about business practices like this and considering, and talking openly, about how these things could be simplified. Read the whole article but the other line seems particularly pertinent.
Email threads and the ability to CC everyone on Earth are a particularly fine source of clusterfucks.
It seems like this might be easier for fresher industries like those that work with the web but unfortunately I can’t imagine the construction industry ever considering their process in this detail or talking about it openly. More is the pity.
*interestingly you should also read Mathew’s post of why he started blogging when the party is apparently now over .