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I’ve researched and consulted on megaprojects for more than 30 years, and I’ve found that two factors play a critical role in determining whether an organization will meet with success or failure: replicable modularity in design and speed in iteration. If a project can be delivered fast and in a modular manner, enabling experimentation and learning along the way, it is likely to succeed. If it is undertaken on a massive scale with one-off, highly integrated components, it is likely to be troubled or fail.

That is from Bent Flyvbjerg in HBR.

Two things this article pointed out that I hadn’t considered before:

• Long timelines in a project create risk because it leaves more time for things to go wrong. I’ve rushed to ship a product before for fear of the competition, but the concern is more general than that. The longer it takes to get going, the more likely that the environment changes — a project sponsor leaves the company or an interested beta customer changes their plans. Even more so for public works.

• Projects that are useful in stages are more resilient. I’ve prioritized shipping a project in iterative chunks as a way of testing a hypothesis about my product before, but never considered that the faster you get a project producing, even partially, the more time its benefits compound and the faster it pays back it’s costs.

The entire article is worth a read, especially if you’re in the midst of planning or executing a major project. The example of the Madrid subway is both obvious and eye opening.

One more thing it made me consider: modularity creates resiliency. One of the ways cathedrals like Notre Dame were able to be built over hundreds of years was by using patterns that were easily understood and able to be extended. Calamities could come and derail projects, leaders could die, but new ones could take their place and take up the work again because of the modularity of the system.

Thanks to The Browser for bringing this one to my attention.

I’ve always thought of myself as an 80 percenter. I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession and degree of specialization that doesn’t appeal to me. Once I reach that 80 percent level, I like to go off and do something totally different; that probably explains the diversity of the Patagonia product line — and why our versatile, multifaceted clothes are the most successful.

From Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard, the founder and owner of Patagonia. Reminds me of David Epstein’s book Range and the compounding value of exposure to different problem types for innovation.

Probably a good habit to ask “What new skill have I reached 80% proficiency at recently?”

I really enjoyed this interview between Casey Newton of the Platformer and Molly White of Web3 is going just great.

In it, Molly made a point I’ve thought about before but not been able to fully articulate, which is that in an effort to align incentives financially, many web3 projects undermine their own effectiveness:

There also aren't really intrinsic monetary incentives for people to contribute to Wikipedia, which I think is a very good thing. Where people are paid to edit Wikipedia by outside parties, it warps the incentive to contribute into one that's very different from (and sometimes at odds with) the incentives for most community members, and is often a very negative thing.

She references Everipedia, a blockchain-based wikipedia alternative:

If you look at their recent blog posts, it's all about how many tokens their editors have supposedly earned, and it even brags about the fact that "Over 70% of stakers have locked their IQ up for over 3.5 years to earn max APR". This is the same token that people are supposed to be spending to edit and vote on the quality of edits, but they're excited that people are locking them up on staking platforms? The goal is not to create a reference work, it's to make money off the token.

Speaking more broadly, monetizing things just shifts the dynamics in enormous ways. We've seen this same thing happen with play-to-earn gaming, where people start doing things really differently when monetary incentives are added.

I think this is a really smart point and poses problems for Web3 projects.

Financial incentives aren’t always the best way to get people to do what you want (see the daycare that started charing parents for being late and then saw an increase in tardiness), except that it’s worse than that for Web3 projects because it makes it harder for them to tell if they have product market fit. Because there isn’t a great way to distinguish the speculators from the true believers, it feels like the project has true momentum, when all it has are people trying to make a quick buck.

Another episode of Browser Bets, this time with Tom Chivers. We made bets about Boris Johnson’s future as Prime Minister of England and the likelihood of AI wiping out humanity.

Bets aside, my favorite part was processing the experience of going through COVID together. Tom and I had never met before this conversation and live thousands of miles away from each other, yet we instantly had this shared experience to talk about. This is pretty unique. Watch the whole thing.

Office spaces are dangerous