If you’ve always managed a project in a certain way; and those projects are not as successful as they might be; then you are Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. You’re the person who has had the same years’ experience 5, 10 or 15 times.

If you have to hunt rats; what’s the right choice of weapon? Probably the air-rifle. The AK-47 could do the job, but it would be inefficient; the amount of energy in each round would be a vast over-kill; accuracy and ricochets in confined spaces would also be a concern. You’d choose the right tool for the job and make sure it’s the right tool.

Every decision involves an element of risk; you might lose your job and not be able to pay back that mortgage that you’ve signed up for. The cascading effects of that are hard to imagine, so you may naturally veer away from the hard decisions but you can’t articulate why. Some decisions need to be emotionally led; but others aren’t or shouldn’t be.

I’ve recently had the pleasure of being involved in the aftermath of a penetration test on a fairly low-key web based application (it was government sponsored; and they quite rightly wanted to test the application for vulnerabilities) during the trial phase and subsequently trying to deal with the recommendations. Some of the previous penetration tests that we’ve undergone seemed quite amateurish in comparison to this one; the disclosures, where appropriate, were very detailed and comprehensive.

Everyone has a gut feeling about things; we seem to be hard wired to make snap judgements about events and things. Evolutionary biologists would probably say that this harks back to when we were hunter-gatherers and had to rapidly make a judgement as to whether something was a threat or not.