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The result is unmistakeable. You can take a project you’re feeling resolutely meh about and suddenly it is super inspired and you’re itching to do it so badly you can’t help but just dive in and start doing the first obvious thing. It can destroy “ordinary planning” impulses.
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This can even be dangerous. The ideal amount of ordinary derisking planning is not zero. If you kill that impulse entirely you can go off half-cocked and really screw things up. Especially when the first few steps involve spending a lot of money, as in high upfront-capex projects
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The trick is to do enough mystification through creative planning to trigger the itch/action bias, but not so much that it destroys all rational planning impulses, creating a whole new kind of impatience risk. A good way to think of it is trial-and-error budget risk.
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If your budget is “3 attempts” and you over-inspire yourself so much that you’re now rushing to blow it all on 0.5 attempt where you’ll run out of money before you even have a first trial outcome, time to slow down and do some ordinary planning too.
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Industrial modes of work are extremely high-capex biased, so naturally have safeguards against a 1-to-0 outcome. A one shot budget being blown to 0 by narcissistic overvisioning and implosions.
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This is ironically a Soviet-style “planning” failure mode. Promise of a false dawn undermining actual rational planning and derisking impulses. The capitalist failure mode is to artificially separate out mystification impulse into a phase labeled “brainstorming” or “exploratory”
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Often, when done in a highly privatized, corporate institutional setting, thus has the effect of creating innovation theater on the sidelines of highly conservative shareholder-value-focused bureaucratic chore/cookbook/formula main flow of work.
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I’ve become highly suspicious of “vision” thinking outside an active tinkering/muddling-through experimental activity. The active trial-and-error, even in highly inefficient and unsinspired (= low hit rate) early muddling-through phase, acts as a control rod to prevent meltdown.
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This is not about theory vs practice. Even in purely theoretical work, like physics or writing, there’s a doer context (doing the math, doing the draft writing) vs purely isolated theorizing context created by exercises like say mind-mapping.
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The doer context cannot be a safe-failure pure test environment. It has to be production tinkering/muddling. It has to be at least open-play as they call it in war games. Or field trials over lab trials.
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Half-assed things in a full-assed way > full-assed things in a half-assed way. Prioritize testing half-assed rocket (whole system) rather than a full-assed engine (subsystem) where possible. Of course eventually you have to do both. But sequence for maximal open-world discovery.
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The key is to do half-assed things in a full-assed way rather than full-assed things in a half-assed way.
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