The Final Destination Argument

Today I am writing about what I call The Final Destination Argument.

The idea goes like this: You are in an important meeting discussing implementation details of something, one of the meeting attendees propose the following scenario

“What if there is a zombie apocalypse and everyone dies, miraculously one of our users survive and they still want to use our app, but all the AWS data centers got burnt during the apocalypse and our service is unreachable, what are we doing then?”

To which someone responds “why would the zombies be interested in burning AWS? This doesn’t make sense”

The discussion goes on.

The sad thing about such discussions is that they derail the meeting. It gets worse in consensus driven cultures where every voice should be heard and all the points should be addressed. I am not against mentioning the improbable but I also like fast decision making. When such discussions start and people go with the flow I know the meeting is over and we will spend the remaining time discussing why zombies don’t like AWS and whether we should move to Azure.

I call this the Final Destination Argument. People discuss death scenarios similar to those in the “Final Destination” movie. I know the people died in the movie but companies also die by being slow.

I am glad I wrote this. Next time I will call it out when someone goes into this.