ABSTRACT

This chapter shows how sterile and uninformative it is to cast the situation confronting a practitioner as dominated by a single, simple goal. Some goal conflicts are inherently technical; they arise from intrinsic technical nature of a domain. The role of goal conflicts arising from multiple, simultaneously active goals may never be noted. The goal conflicts may be discounted as requiring no effort to resolve, where the weighting of goals appears in retrospect to "have been obvious" in ways that require no discussion. Goal conflicts between safer, better, and cheaper were reconciled by doing the work more cheaply, superficially better and apparently without cost to safety. But dilemmas and goal conflict that confront practitioners are more intimately connected to the details of sharp end practice. Multiple, simultaneously active goals are the rule rather than the exception for virtually all domains in which expertise is involved.