Just because fires are inevitable in the business of firefighting, doesn’t mean that firefighters are in the business of starting fires.

In engineering, thinking is inevitable but also costly and error-prone, and the more thinking an engineer needs to do the higher the costs, the higher the risks of errors. We should be striving to minimize the thinking required every step of the way, even if we’ll never get it down to zero; that’s the only way to keep it from spiraling towards infinity.