"Trying to capture as many future histories as possible" (keeping your options open) harmonizes well with Paul Graham's view on procrastination (http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html) and the tenet of "put off decisions as long as possible".

UPDATE: Evidently several smart people have had this intuition. I just remembered who said, "Never make a decision until you have to" -- it was Randy Pausch in the "The Last Lecture" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo).

And "delay commitment until the last responsible moment" is also an agile principle (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/10/the-last-responsibl...).