Paradoxes, IT, comfort and growth

Last week I learned of the Abilene Paradox.
It comes from a story of a hot summer day where a family decides to take a 2 hours ride to an other town to go to a restaurant.
On the way back, they are all miserables and start blaming each other. Only then did they realised that nobody wanted to go.
They didn't say anything, because they thought that someone else wanted to go.

I don't know why it made me think of IT as I write this.
I think it's this idea of comfort and growth mindset that exists in parallel with exercise and energy management.
Comfort is energy management and it is important.
Exercise is part of a growth mindset - accepting that things can change.

The idea that it's comfortable to do things for others might be counter-intuitive, but it is conflict-avoidance by an other name.

We have this question in IT that comes often: What are the tradeoffs.
Somehow it is assumed that every decisions will have a tradeoff.
I guess it is the equivalent of the concept of opportunity cost in economics.
I don't know why it is so present in IT though - I think it's probably because the trade Time vs Space is ever so present.

TECH APARTE EXPLANATION WITH EXAMPLE - SKIPPABLE
In tech, you can precompute and information and save it somewhere or you can compute it on the go.
One costs space, as you have to save the info somewhere - the other one costs in time as you have to wait for the info to be computed everytime.

We can live with these tradeoffs before the choice was made, and even change them afterwards - though that last part is difficult because it requires the humility to accept we were wrong.
I think that were IT people are good is to point out different costs.
What they are not great with is imagining living with a tradeoff that is not quantifiable.
Living in paradox is tough -- I loved the podcast episode of Rene Brown and Adam Grant on this

Also I think communication with each other, and marketing communication would benefit from this.