Hey, I'm not sure how to interpret your emoji reaction, but it doesn't seem like you understand my response. I figure it's worth another try.
I understand that you're trying to back your friend up. He made a comment that says more about his opinion of politicians than about how speed limits are determined, and you wanted to support him. I get it. So, you shared some war stories that you think help make his point. But when I say I saw it all in there, I wasn't being sarcastic. In your stories, there's some science, some art, and some politics (small "p", organizational politics... not big "P" politics). The main point, though, is that none of this is arbitrary. Arbitrary suggests that it's random... just a flip of a coin. The reality of any decisions like this is that they are seldom arbitrary, and the better you understand the relative influence of the science, the art, and the politics of a situation, the more predictable the decisions become (and the more influence you can have over the outcome).
So, simply put, what I was getting at is that high level decisions are seldom all that simple. The sausage making process is messy... a sausage fest, if you will.
So, maybe I didn't explain what I mean by science, art, and politics well enough.
What I mean by science are things that are objective and supported by data. This looks different depending on your field. In big "P" politics, it's going to be different than if you work in a large government agency, a large corporation, a small corporation, a non-profit, or anything else. But science is simply meant to stand in for that objective information. In your anecdotes, you very clearly talked about the science of designing a car.
Art represents feelings and emotions... things that may be informed by the science, or may just as often conflict with the science. In this bucket are things like preference (two things roughly equal, I like to do it one way and you may prefer the other). You mention this kind of thing pretty often in your stories. Art is very important in some fields, particularly if that field involves customer support. In the automotive industry, I expect how a car makes the customer feel is important... I mean, I recall some conversations around here about what is and isn't a Mustang. That's a part of decision making, for sure.
And then politics... and again, I'm talking about organizational politics. And this is really just a label for organizational interests. What pressures are exerted on a decision maker. Some common factors can be statutory influences, risk (individual and organizational), hierarchical influences, historical precedence, organizational culture (and this can lead to the personality of an organization... whether components interact competitively or collaboratively... whether information is siloed or shared, etc). Once again, your stories had elements of politics in them, too.
So, all that to say, you wrote a lot of words to share some stories that you intended (and may even believe) represented arbitrary decision making. But what you really did was share stories that illustrate the point that decisions... even bad ones... are never arbitrary, but are in fact made by some combination of three factors: art, science, and politics.
I hope this helps. This is the sort of thing that most people don't need or even want to know. It's pretty boring stuff, really. But when you start to get into upper management and executive level decision making, the better you understand it, the more successful and influential you will be. And if you are also highly competent and effective in your role you can exert a lot of constructive influence within the organization.
