What is foolish consistency

Stan Carey is a freelance editor, proofreader and writer from the west of Ireland. He tweets at StanCarey. Can I help preserve a clearer or more consistent usage? Can I get students to pay attention? And so I stickle, although I pick my battles carefully. But different students, of course, have different needs. Forte, anyone? Or banal, or post-positive however? Thanks for your comment, Arthur. And documentation , especially documentation surrounding expectations, enables a consistent approach, not only in training design, but also in working with training teams.

If team members know the expectations, they also know what they need to achieve. We use several documents to help us be consistent.

They have a variety of names, but all go to the same ends. Combined, all work to ensure that the training product—be it an elearning course, website, instructor presentation, or participant manual, is consistent with the expectations of other team members, management, and stakeholders. The idea is to widely share these documents. When designers and developers have the testing script that quality assurance staff will be using, they can make sure that the training materials follow testing standards as they are building it.

In rare cases, consistency can become a self-perpetuating monster: It has to be used for a purpose. A foolish consistency is one that serves no benefit for the end user. Making things look and work the same is pointless if the user can no longer accomplish their tasks. Rank making things useful above making them consistent. An example is interfaces for video games. Imagine your company was developing two video games, a driving game and a Pac-Man game. The best UI for the driving game would be a steering wheel, but the Pac-Man game would work better with a joystick and some buttons.

Trying to design one UI to use for both of these games would be a disaster. Consistency applied to certain user tasks can make the user experience worse, not better. Consistency does not guarantee usability. It generally helps a user interface, but there are no guarantees in interface design. In the traffic-light example, the timing of the yellow light in a four-way intersection might be changed by engineers to compensate for the specific traffic patterns of an intersection.

A longer yellow light in one direction may give the busier road more time to get cars through than the other road with less traffic. A great person does not have to think consistently from one day to the next.

Emerson does not explain the difference between foolish and wise consistency. France 24 is providing live, round-the-clock coverage of both scenes as they progress. But Babylon asks us to do a little more: It wants us to empathize.

Everybody is trapped in an elevator together and tempers run a little hot.