You Ain't Gonna Need It, YAGNI. A helpful tool to remind us to carefully consider building no more than we need to solve the problem in front of us. I see it mostly applied to software development questions but the same tension between investment cost, flexibility, and eventual value applies elsewhere and it's on my mind because I am thinking about two very different experiences with internal process. Without going into too much depth, there was an ancient process that my team ran infrequently and which had been slated for removal for a long time. At one point it had probably been a sleek and streamlined racing yacht but, by the time I encountered it, it handled like a barnacle-covered leaky skip. Big changes, however, were always postponed in favour of more pressing concerns and, when I last worked my way through it, I found that a whole new outrigger had been bolted onto the side to support another process. It can be tempting to think of this crustiness as YAGNI at a kind of...