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
Conversation
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.
1
2
16
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.
1
3
“Overmotivated underachievement” as a book I read called it.
Vision implosion.
1
8
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.
GIF
read image description
ALT
1
1
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”
1
11
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.
1
1
10
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.
1
1
22
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.
1
7
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.
1
9
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.
Quote Tweet
The key is to do half-assed things in a full-assed way rather than full-assed things in a half-assed way.
Show replies
Show replies
Replying to
So rather than perfection as enemy of good enough...
Keep Perfecting the good enough...
All starts with a lump of clay
GIF
read image description
ALT
1



