Fail-fast can sharpen a local decision, yet it cannot serve as the operating philosophy for a large system. Complex organizations survive because people invest, coordinate, optimize, repair, and keep building through cascading effects.

Brian Greenforest argues for human intelligence as the active force that manages complexity. Slack and redundancy help in specific places; growth requires new minds with the time and authority to solve new classes of problems.

A Red Button Changes a System

Software engineers work with cascading effects every day. One change can alter data, behavior, cost, security, and every service downstream, so a local trial never captures the entire design problem.

Large systems accumulate relationships that demand deliberate architecture. Teams must understand those relationships, choose tradeoffs, and maintain coherence as the system expands.

Fund the Minds That Make Growth Possible

Debt and investment can purchase something more valuable than spare capacity: focused human attention. Existing teams cannot absorb every new responsibility without abandoning the work that already sustains the system.

Hire the people who can own the next layer of complexity. Give them the resources to optimize the whole, and use rapid tests as instruments inside a larger strategy of intelligent growth.

Build a System Large Enough to Outgrow Fail-Fast Thinking

The Missing Maker Fab turns this argument into a complete cross-layer program spanning tools, materials, devices, manufacturing, and education.

The Missing Maker Fab

Originally posted on LinkedIn

Brian Greenforest · Wednesday, March 23, 2022 at 3:46:10 PM PDT (2022-03-23 22:46:10 UTC)

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You probably heard and applied the strategy that is highly influential among DevOps and DesOps practitioners, and especially among Silicon Valley founders and investors. Fail fast. As a Software Engineer, I write code with cascading effects on a daily basis. Think about a red button. I am essentially vulnerable to the appeal of the butterfly effect. After the 2008 financial crisis, a Black Swan of Nicholas Nassim Taleb has conducted a harsh attack on statisticians and experts in mathematical optimization. A well deserved attack, because neural networks can't be trained to curve fit an arbitrary function: that's why I still have a job! Look, Hilbert's 13th problem is solved, but in order to RUN that trained function you need more logic gates than atoms in the universe! Proof of the butterfly effect does not exist. Proof of automatic emergence of complexity from some chaotic interactions does not exist either. The notion of self-organized criticality has never been proven, and Fermi-Pasta-Ulam thermalization problem remains the biggest unsolved mystery. The so called "butterfly effect" and "emergence" are two biggest intellectual frauds of the last 20 years. But the world will never be the same after what Taleb did with "fail fast". Look. You find the pessimism of Stoics. You find a lot of advise on how to not risk at all. But the worst of it all, you find a misdirecting advice on how to build LARGE and COMPLEX systems. To "build", you hear me??? In its most compelling phrase out of the whole book named "Black Swan" that Taleb has published in 2010, a virus is being implanted into YOUR OWN MIND, when he states " Complex systems survive thanks to slack and redundancy, not debt and optimization. " I completely, totally, unequivocally---disagree. Complex systems survive thanks to optimization done by intelligent agents. We have to borrow money to maintain large complex systems suffering from entropy that was caused by Taleb's advice to have redundancy and slack at the first place. To solve system inconsistencies and to let your system grow, you have to hire those damn people! Borrow money. Debt is required, because systems are made of MINDS of people. People who already work for you can't be distracted to do another work. The increased entropy is managed by creative intelligent design thinking of new people: the system is made of those who already make the system. You have to hire more people. Not to give Taleb his slack and redundancy, but to solve those large hairy wicked complex problems! Black Swan is a big lie. Hire people. Borrow money. Grow. Believe in HUMAN INTELLIGENCE. Human agents are those who solve complex problems. Optimization has nothing to do with efficiency. It's management of complexity.