When "Yes" is the Wrong Answer

Systems Engineering's value comes from doing effective pre-work to avoid later, expensive rework. There are many barriers to uptake of Systems Engineering, including the difficulty of abstract and holistic thinking and project time pressures. This paper focuses on the time pressures, and the usual desire to show positive progress in any form of review of a project. This leads to a behavior where there is a tendency to say "yes" in answer to a question because we know it is the desired answer. Inappropriate "yes" statements to questions like "Are the requirements complete?" result in a tendency to stop the pre-work, and start the solution stage pre-maturely or with false confidence. The paper proposes as a heuristic that the Systems Engineer recognizes that there are implicit dangers in answering "yes" to many review type questions.