Base situation 1.

My larger family has a holiday home. It means that many (~6) families are sharing this place. Everything is going more or less fine. We have big family gatherings there otherwise everybody can book out weekends / weeks in a calendar when they want to go. We have also very healthy discussions around what direction we should develop the place into. During such a discussion it came up that there is a wall (~1.5) in the garten. We didn't really use the grassy area on the top and the idea was to put bushes there, so we don't need to mow it every time and we expect that it would look better during the hot summer. One of the families raised the issue that they also want to have a fence on the top of this wall preventing the kids from falling.

Base situation 2.

During the years I have been in big fights against all kind of processes that our small(ish) company was willing to introduce. Whenever a problem came up, we usually reacted with a process. I have got the feedback many times, that 'wow this company is really nicely run, you are so well organized, you have processes for everything'. One of these examples the Operational Runbooks (see other article if I submit it once)

Observation

I find it really difficult to tell if the above examples are overreactions. Or probably better to say, that I strongly believe that these things are overreactions, but I find it very difficult to discuss. I don't have good arguments against this over-cautious world. We try to avoid every risk but actually risk is what is exciting, that's where we live. We take away the wall from the kids, they are either not gonna learn falling from 1.5m high (which is not very high) or - which is more likely in the case of my kids - they are going to climb up to the fence and jump from 2+m high. We are doing the same with processes. We are not letting people learning how to deal with issues. We have to teach them how to fall, not how not to fall.

Problem

I'm writing this because I lost most of my battles against processes. I don't have good arsenal when it come to discuss these matters. And this is gonna be the same with the fence. I think I'm not gonna even try to fight this battle. It's just not worth it.

Pun

Funny enough that my manager told me, that he doesn't understand why the company is delivering new features. When I pointed out that probably we shouldn't have safety net everywhere (even on low risk situationsN) that we have to check / maintain / etc., we probably wouldn't spend much time on them. My manager reaction was that these processes are making things faster.... I didn't have anything to say.