Yesterday, I spent hours engineering a web component for a product comparison system. By the time I finally came up for air, it had spiralled into something very complex indeed.
It didn’t feel right. I needed some perspective so I gave myself a break.
These things happen. It’s just part of the process — so long as you give yourself the space to question your work.
But what happens when those questions don’t get asked? And the spiral continues unchecked? Pretty quickly you may find yourself deep in the sunk cost fallacy — too invested to stop.
And speaking of the sunk cost fallacy — if you’re British like me, you’ll be all too familiar with HS2 (High Speed Rail Network). And also like me, you’ll probably love to moan about how much money has been wasted on it.
Approved in 2012 at a budget of £33 billion, HS2 was supposed to connect London to Birmingham by 2026. It will now cost a whopping £102.7 billion — more than three times the original estimate. The northern leg to Manchester has been scrapped entirely, and what remains won’t open until at least 2040.
Experts are blaming this catastrophic misuse of taxpayers’ money on overengineering:
Overly complex stations,
unnecessary tunnelling,
and gold-plated specs.
Meanwhile, Spain managed to build the world’s second largest high-speed rail network, connecting all major cities at 300km/h, at a quarter of the cost per kilometre of HS2.
How?
Simpler stations,
less tunnelling,
and more affordable parts.
The best lesson to take from all of this was a phrase coined by Kelly Johnson at Lockheed Martin — the man who built the world’s fastest plane. The SR-71 Blackbird flew at over 2,193 mph — more than three times the speed of sound. No aircraft since has come close to its records, more than half a century later.
And despite designing the most advanced aircraft in history, he believed that everything he built must be repairable by an average mechanic in the field, under combat conditions, using only basic tools. He coined a phase thats been cited amongst engineers ever since:
Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS)Clarence Leonard "Kelly" Johnson
So when I returned to my desk to fix my over engineered product comparison table — I took a leaf out of Kelly Johnson’s book:
I chose to make use of data and components that already existed and the result was superior for it.