Frying Scotsman

Thinking about this further: Every design/implementation loop involves alternating between planning and gathering feedback. Planning allows you to develop, feedback allows you to course correct. I believe that frequent course correction is more important than planning quality. For example, during the Korean war, the American F-86 Sabre was outclassed in every edge-of-the-envelope performance spec by its counterpart, the Soviet Mikoyan-Gurevich 15. And yet, in clashes between the two, the overall kill ratio heavily favored the Sabre. Why? Because air combat isn't a climb rate contest. It's about precision maneuvering. And the Sabre had superior control responsiveness, due to its full set of hydraulically-boosted control surfaces, which the MiG lacked. This gave it a shorter delay between between pilot input and aircraft response. This mean that American pilots were essentially playing this high-stakes video game with a much higher frame rate and lower ping time, and they could make minor corrections with greater accuracy. In other words, a tighter feedback loop wins. I believe that this is a general principle which holds true across many fields. Plans are necessary, but they are always guesswork. It is better to improve a plan by frequent grounding to reality, and course correcting, than it is to spend lots of effort on any iteration of the plan. As Fredrick Brooks put it, "Plan to throw one away. You will anyway." Just start building. Just start writing. Just start coding. It's okay if that means you make mistakes. Because those mistakes are the whole point. The work product of early design iterations isn't a successful, working program, or machine, or story, or system. The goal of your early iterations is the knowledge you gain from your failures. I haven't ever had the privilege of working with John, but I'd wager that he doesn't do a deep dive before starting to code. I'll bet he just starts coding, and the deep dives happen when those early efforts have given him a detailed understanding of the real shapes of the obstacles in his path.