My pal Brandon Hays and I are fond of noting that projects have a very limited tolerance for the risk of picking a novel technology or approach. Thus, they should intentionally choose one thing to break ground on: database, language, domain model, testing methodology, design paradigm, etc.
Turns out, that’s sort of a thing in social psychology too:
Idiosyncrasy credit is a concept in social psychology that describes an individual’s capacity to acceptably deviate from group expectations. Idiosyncrasy credits are increased (earned) each time an individual conforms to a group’s expectations, and decreased (spent) each time an individual deviates from a group’s expectations.
Turns out this is strongly related to leadership, group expectations, and conformism. That explains a lot of my experience. Those most interested in trying novel approaches are often those who let expectations and conformism take a backseat to trying something new or breaking the mold.
I don’t think this is necessarily good or bad; it’s fine and healthy for a project to choose to vary from the norm in some way. Even better, manage those variances so if things don’t go to plan, you can back them out and keep rolling. But, it doesn’t hurt to consider varying in ways that are likely to yield more “credits” amongst your team.
