Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure
Author Tim Harford, who recently gave a great Ted talk on trial and error, provides a series of economic studies and narrative histories of events which discuss the role that trial and error, or evolution, rather than revolution, played in achieving economic progress. Evolution is essentially a story of variation, selection, and survival. Tim tells this story by explaining how bad products and ideas are selected and replaced by variation with time by good technology, and these adaptions, like good genes, can then serves as the basis for further evolution in products, processes, and decision-making.
Tim suggests there are three necessary conditions for this economic adaption: (1) try new things, fully expecting that only a portion of these trials will be successful, (2) seek out feedback as you go, and learn from that feedback, abandoning dead-ends as early as possible, and (3) do things in a scale so you're likely to survive to keep trying more things in the future. Tim provide a rich tapestry of historical events, experiments, and insights to justify these three ingredients. His insights span the range of application from government, to business, and to the individual, and uses these antecdotes to reinforce these three principles, and apply them to new situations.
The material is a very fast read, and is a rich source of quotable material for those interested in improvement patterns.
