Allegories

Chicken-Chopping:
A woman preparing a chicken to be roasted in an oven removes the head and legs before putting the bird into the oven. Her husband asks why she does this and she replies that it's just "part of the recipe" her family has always used to cook chicken passed down from her grandmother. Curious, the husband asks the grandmother-in-law "Why do you chop the heads and feet off the chicken before you put it in the oven?". The grandmother responds that when she cooked chickens, the ovens were much smaller and the chickens wouldn't fit in unless you chopped the heads and feet off.

(alt.) Onion-Boiling:
A chemist working in a plant that produces varnish is following the recipe his company uses to produce varnish, which involves tossing an onion in the varnish mixture. He wonders why this is, and after some sleuthing discovers the reason was that before the advent of advanced equipment to measure the temperature of the mixture, they used the onion because "when it came out fried" it indicated that the mixture was hot enough.

Bike-shedding (People Over-index on things that are easy to understand, even when those things aren't the most important):
"The act of wasting time on trivial details while important matters are inadequately attended is sometimes known as bikeshedding. That term originates from Parkinson's observation of a committee organized to approve plans for a nuclear power plant. As Parkinson noted, the committee devoted a disproportionate amount of time to relatively unimportant details -- such as the materials for a bicycle storage shed -- which limited the time available to focus on the design of the nuclear plant."

Yak-Shaving:
https://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/old-archive/gsb-archive/gsb2000-02-11.html
"Yak shaving." Our very own Carlin Vieri invented the term, and yet it has not caught on within the lab. This is a shame, because it describes all too well what I find myself doing all too often.
You see, yak shaving is what you are doing when you're doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you're supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you're doing to the original meta-task.

Bullet-Tracing (Abraham Wald / Survivor's Bias):
WW2 engineers in the U.S. are looking at planes and deciding where to increase armor plating. They take "heat maps" of where planes returning from combat missions have been hit with enemy fire and draw what seems to be a reasonable conclusion: "Let's put the plates on the places where these planes are getting shot."  Abraham Wald wisely points out that they should do the _inverse_ of this because the marks on the planes returning show "what kind of hits planes can take and _survive_ to return".

Chesterton's Fence:
A young reformer meets an old politician in a field and complains about a fence and explains his desire to rip it out. "Do you know why it's there in the first place?" asks the old politician. "No" says the young reformer "I have no idea". "Well, then, I will certainly not allow you to take it out until you have a reasonable understanding of why it's there."

Well-Pissing (Pitfalls of Incrementalism & Measurement Culture... the story of how the Modern Web was destroyed):
A man lives in a house with no bathroom and every night at midnight he has to pee. He walks 200 paces from his house and relieves himself. One night, he is very tired and decides he doesn't want to walk 200 paces. He stops at his well (which is only 10 paces) and makes a deal with himself: "I'll pee in the well, just for tonight... But I'll take care to sample the water tomorrow morning and if it tastes bad I'll go back to walking 200 paces." He samples the water the next day and to his delight, he can't notice any change in the taste. So he decides he will start peeing in his well every night...

Goodhart's Law (Perils of Making "Performance Targets"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Goodhart's law is an adage often stated as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".[1] It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who advanced the idea in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom:[2][3]
Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

Gold-Plating:
Working beyond the scope of the mission when no one requested it (in a group setting or project). Sort of related to Yak-shaving.

Frog-Swallowing:
From Mark Twain: "When one's job is to swallow a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning"
or colloquially: "Do the hardest thing first".
Tweak with "willpower effect' and do 1 short easy thing, and then the hardest thing.

Dunning-Krueger Effect:
People who don't know enough to know how bad they are at things believe they are awesome.