The document discusses various types of failures in organizations and projects, including failures due to trivial issues that receive disproportionate attention ("bikeshedding"), entrepreneurs who overpromise and underdeliver, and behavioral patterns among team members that can contribute to failure, such as passing blame and not taking responsibility for issues ("chain of irresponsibility"). Specific examples of failures are provided for projects, methodologies, and individuals to illustrate different kinds of failures and how they can be avoided or overcome through learning from mistakes.

1. Patterns of Fail
Don't know, don't care

2. Why do we fail ?

3. Failure
Failure is an option - most people working hard or seriously will
have failures to account for. The most interesting and character
defining trait of these people is how they recovered.
Advocates for Competence based interviewing teach do
concentrate on mistakes as learning experiencies.
Honesty rings a bell - What was the last time you f* up and how
you made up to that ?

4. Fail
There is failure, and there is FAIL
- Project managers managing HTML pages - Fail
- Methodologies sold as silver bullet - Fail
- Excess Excitement - Fail
- Less code, more tests - Fail
- Architecture of CRUD - Fail
- Failure and then failure again - FAIL
- Fall, Rise and Fail - EPIC FAIL

5. Behind the fail

6. Bikeshedding
Parkinson's Law of Triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957
argument that organisations give disproportionate weight to trivial
issues.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law_of_Triviality)

8. http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Paper_clip

9. Entrepreneurs
Once upon a time there was
a 30-ish year-old vagrant
who never had a job. He had
never done a thing.
He thought he was fucking
clever so he started trying to
convince people by doing
magic stuff to impress dumb
folks around the way.
Not Jesus folks, meet the
CULT OF REWORK

11. Entrepreneurs - Cult of Rework

12. Entrepreneurs - Cult of Rework

13. Behavioral Patterns
Lazy observer - Object to be realized some day
Chain of irresponsibility (single irresponsibility principle)
Dumb interpreter - impedance mismatch
Mediator - the wireless phone
Visitor - constant visitor to the project
Strategy - see capt. obvious, prophets of the past

14. Lazy Observer
"I just work here"
"I am not the technical person (more from product owners)"
" X is my role, and that was not described on it"
Commitment. Ownership.
The specialist.

15. Chain of Irresponsibility
The naive belief in "Best practices"
Broadcasting errors. Optimizations. Trust the database.
Developer blames sysadmin, sysadmin blames network guys,
network guys blames infrastructure which blames ......
"Hudson is not red anymore, time to go home"
Github and Continous Integration

16. Dumb Interpreter
Someone once said that there should be more tests than code.
Then a horde followed back and forgot that good code works.
Tons of tests for stupid code. DOJOs follow up. Until the day
there is a project which is not a CRUD.
Best practices for system administration should make
developers and syadmins work together.
Then someone comes with devops and Infrastructure as code
and TDD for infrastructure - lets create a failing alarm, and
correct it installing the proper service. Until you have 1M users
with no service available.

17. Mediator
Simply said, the guy between the manager and the
programmer/sysadmin.
Methodology roles that somehow morphs into job descriptions.
WHO ?

18. Visitor
Your pair on pair programming.
The guy who checks his iPhone, his watch, corrects comment's
spelling and helps writing commit messages while you are
working on a CSS file.
The guy that's keep arguing over trivial semantics (see bike
shedding)
Your very own partner, discussing which VIM theme is better
for syntax highlight

19. Strategy
So there is this guy who knows everything. He has the most
amazing ideas about everything.
He is Warren Buffett in somebody else's body. For some
(unfair) reason, he doesn't own the company.
But he is the man and start shitting theories, rules and
products. When the real world comes over and proves he's a
smartacus, then you realize he is ...

21. Captain Obvious is never wrong. Those ideas were not his. He
always knew that the product would fail but he is altruistic and
let people learn from their mistakes.
At every moment, count on a perfect and didactic explanation
to what went wrong and a fucking gigantic email blaming
somebody else.
Right in the sky, above all clouds...
CAPTAIN OBVIOUS, THE PROPHET OF THE PAST

22. Futility Belt