the more adapted an organism was to present conditions, the less adaptable it tended to be to unknown future conditions. - Gerald M. Weinberg

The Hawthorne Effect (“the process of being observed often motivates people to better performance”) can be the bane of scientific observation.

If your whole team consists of novice programmers, your expertise will give you considerable power; but if the other team members are also experts, they will attach less importance to your technical expertise. In that case, they’ll pay more attention to organizational power, like the power to acquire extra hardware, to extend the schedule, or to capture a more interesting assignment.

human interactions are never narrow, never straight, and hardly ever in the directions shown an organization charts. Many serious mistakes have been made in imagining that formal structure was the only structure in an organization.