Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroying mistake
Software dev 20+ years: management is right to ask for estimates. It&#x27;s ok for engineers to write a throwaway design paper to &quot;get into&quot; the problem before turning to jira epics and stories. It&#x27;s also right for engineers to reject arbitrary dates, pressure to cut corners and so on. But this or the ops story absolutely don&#x27;t get anybody anywhere.<p>You wanna move beyond anecdotes and nice sounding business arguments? Read FIRO by Dr. Schutz prob out of print or &quot;Human element&quot; by same. His son Ethan has updated these books.<p>Look, in normal high functioning groups conflict is normal. What confers distinction there is two things:<p>- no individual on team is ridgid and unchanging<p>- conflict is resolved with 100pct buy-in ie not cause the boss yelled, or you were out gamed, politics, favourites. IOW there is trust in the team (together with self awareness, competence etc which the book hits on)<p>When human factors burn down projects down the issues are quite a bit more about trust, individual self awareness, defensive behaviors, and not resolving the problem in a group way. Trying to eliminate conflict with rules of thumbs is a fool&#x27;s errand. Conflict itself is not a sign of badness.<p>References to organizational modalities (the strong boss, the clear vision, and similar sounding approaches) help at the margins only and then only randomly.