Common Sense Has Left the Building

When Stating the obvious becomes a full-time job.

There was a time when engineering relied on something simple and powerful: shared understanding. Unwritten principles, basic reasoning, and a sense of direction that did not need to be re-explained every week. Teams moved because people thought, anticipated, and acted. The obvious remained obvious.

Today, the obvious is an endangered species.

Modern IT has entered a strange era in which implicit knowledge has collapsed. Everything must be spelled out. Every trivial behaviour requires a template. Every action needs a ticket. The smallest judgement call becomes a committee discussion. People freeze the moment the script ends.

The result is brutal: friction everywhere, inertia in every interaction, and a culture paralysed by its own lack of common sense.

This is not a process issue. It is a cognitive and cultural regression.

The death of implicits

Healthy teams rely on implicits: the unspoken rules that keep collaboration fluid. Shared expectations, shared values, shared sense of quality, shared understanding of what "good" looks like. When implicits exist, communication overhead stays low and intelligent autonomy flourishes. Engineers do not wait to be moved like pieces on a board. They move because they see what must be done.

When implicits vanish, everything becomes explicit. Every step must be described. Every edge case must be pre-authorised. Every situation becomes a negotiation because nobody wants to infer anything. The cost is invisible until you add it up: hesitation, repeated explanations, misalignment, shallow thinking, and an organisation burdened by people who cannot operate without instructions.

This is the world many teams live in today. A world where simple truths must be justified again and again because the collective ability to reason has atrophied. A world where people need a user story to prepare a demo, even though the demo should drive the entire rhythm of learning. A world where engineers stare at a backlog, unable to connect dots unless someone writes the next explicitly defined move.

It is not surprising that friction is proportional to the lack of implicits.

Three consequences you cannot ignore

1. Friction skyrockets

The less people understand by default, the more time they waste asking, validating, rechecking, or interpreting trivial information. When someone needs written instructions for what used to be common sense, the entire flow slows down. The team becomes heavier, slower, and less resilient.

The irony is painful: the more we try to make everything foolproof, the more fools it creates, and by the rules of stupidity described by Carlo Cipolla, we always underestimate the damage that committed stupidity can inflict.

2. Agency collapses

A team cannot succeed when its members behave like operators, not engineers. Agency requires imagination, anticipation, and the willingness to act on incomplete information while remaining connected to reality. This has been replaced by a culture of passivity. People do not ask themselves questions. They do not explore the system. They do not try to understand the boundaries. They simply wait to be moved, like pawns on a chessboard.

Worse, many refuse to take the first step unless they can understand everything upfront, as if certainty existed before action. Yet each step is supposed to reveal the information needed for the next one. This is the essence of empirical work, and its rejection has created a culture of fear-driven development where progress halts until every imaginary risk is neutralised.

This is why modern organisations stall even when the process looks perfect. They have removed the one ingredient no framework can replace: people who think and grow.

3. Superficial confidence replaces competence

The collapse of implicits fuels the worst cognitive trap: the Dunning–Kruger effect. When information is spoon-fed, people mistake access for understanding. They repeat patterns they do not grasp. They defend positions based on slogans, not reasoning. They believe they are competent simply because they have absorbed enough surface-level noise.

Modern IT worships templates, checklists, and shallow certainty. Meanwhile, basic engineering habits have disappeared. The ability to challenge, explore, and question reality has weakened. This is how organisations drift towards superficiality and fragmentation.

Why this happened

Several forces converged to create this cultural decline:

• Endless churn of people and priorities.
• Organisations that value opinions over reasoning.
• A culture that fears discomfort and therefore avoids honest expectations.
• The erosion of apprenticeship and mentoring.
• An obsession with safety that infantilises rather than empowers.
• Narcissism and personal agendas that override collective responsibility.

"Convention over configuration" once captured a belief that teams could understand and work with sensible defaults. That trust has disappeared. We now live in a world where even defaults must be annotated because the shared mental model is gone.

It is not surprising. If you raise generations of professionals on shallow information, dopamine-driven tasks, and superficial content, you eventually create people disconnected from reality. People who need reality spelled out for them because they no longer observe it.

What to do: Five direct, uncomfortable fixes

1. Restore implicits deliberately

You cannot wait for common sense to reappear. You must define essential principles once, set the standard, and hold the line. Stop renegotiating the basics. Once expectations are clear, treat them as non-negotiable. A team is not democratic about physics, logic, or quality.

2. Stop accepting passive behaviour

People who repeatedly ask "what do I do?" instead of asking "what is needed?" drain every system they touch. Encourage initiative. Expect anticipation. Reward people who connect dots without waiting for permission. If you tolerate passivity, you normalise incompetence.

3. Bring reality back through working demos

Agile was built on empirical flow. The demo drives everything: planning, learning, direction, and iteration. If people need user stories to prepare a retrospective, the culture has already collapsed. Bring back the living system as the centre of gravity. Use it to force understanding and reconnect people with consequences.

4. Re-establish engineering judgement as a first-class skill

You cannot lead a modern organisation with people who execute tasks but do not understand the system. Raise the bar. Push people to think. Expect reasoning. Demand clarity. Reinforce the idea that engineering is not obedience, but disciplined autonomy.

5. Reintroduce apprenticeship

Implicit knowledge spreads through proximity: guidance, feedback, pairing, repetition. Not through templates. Not through tooltips. Not through workshops. Invest in mentorship. Encourage seniors to teach. Encourage juniors to follow craft. The loss of implicits is, at its core, the loss of apprenticeship.

Real-world examples

Nokia’s collapse

Nokia had brilliant engineers and decades of market dominance, yet the organisation slid into a culture where decisions were made to preserve personal comfort, not reality. Engineers stopped challenging assumptions because leaders did not want to hear bad news. Implicit technical judgement vanished under layers of bureaucracy, and fear-driven development paralysed innovation. By the time the organisation could finally articulate the obvious, it was already too late.

Boeing and the erosion of engineering authority

Boeing’s shift from an engineering-led organisation to a finance-driven one replaced craftsmanship, safety culture, and engineering autonomy with process cosmetics, cost-cutting, and managerial pressure. The 737 MAX disasters were the catastrophic result of a company where nobody felt empowered to challenge decisions, where common sense warnings were ignored, and where personal agendas overrode engineering judgement.

Healthcare.gov launch failure

The original Healthcare.gov rollout collapsed because no one owned the whole system, no one connected dots, and everyone assumed someone else would make the obvious calls. Dozens of teams waited for explicit instructions that never came. With no shared implicits, no technical leadership, and no empirical feedback loops, the system failed instantly. It was rescued only when a small autonomous team reintroduced basic engineering discipline and direct ownership.

Amazon’s success in early AWS

Early AWS succeeded because teams shared strong implicits: ownership, autonomy, clarity of responsibility, and engineering-first thinking. The "you build it, you run it" principle reduced coordination overhead and empowered teams to move with clarity and speed. This is the positive counterexample: when implicits are strong, quality and velocity rise naturally.

A final truth

A team that cannot run on implicits cannot scale. An organisation that needs everything explained cannot adapt. The more explicit you need to be about the obvious, the weaker the system becomes.

If you need a ticket for common sense, you no longer have a team.
You have a helpdesk.