Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p245-7
EXPERIMENTATION AND LOW COST FAILURE
Allowing and excepting for failure at low cost is beneficial as it allows us the freedom to try a combination of approaches, “the exploration of multiple possibilities”
- we are collapsing, what economists call, the opportunity cost, and increasing the chance for emergence and innovation
“the most important reasons are that open systems lower the cost of failure, they do not create biases in favour of predictable but substandard outcomes, and they make it simpler to integrate the contributions of people who contribute only a single idea”
“most organisations attempt to reduce the effect of failure by reducing its likelihood [and cost]. Imagine that you are spearheading an effort for a firm that wants to become more innovative. You are given a list of promosing but speculative ideas, and you have to choose some subset of them for investment. You thus have to guess the likelihood of success or failure for each project. The obvious problem is that no one knows for certain what will succeed and what will fail. A less obvious but potentially more significant problem is that the possible value of various projects is unconnected to anything their designers say about them…in these circumstances, you will inevitably green-light failures and pass on potential successes. Worse still, more people will remember you saying yes to a failure than saying no to a radical but promising idea. Given this asymmetry, you will be pushed to make safe choices, thus systematically undermining the rationale for trying to be more innovative in the first place”
- The concept of enterprise 2.0 doesnt change the likelihood of failure, but it reduces the cost, as it provides an ecosystem to test out all ideas at less expense and at great reach. Ideas are chosen based on the idea alone rather than because it is a safe choice.
- it reduces the cost of exploring the fitness landscape
“in traditional organisations, trying anything is expensive, even if just in staff time to discuss the idea, so someone must make some attempt to filter the successes from the failures in advance. In open systems, the cost of trying something is so low that handicapping the likelihood of success is often an unnecessary distraction”
- similar to dave snowden safe-fail
