That is hard to say and it would be a book worthy to explain what could come next. All I know is that it is unsustainable.
The complexity is simply too high and it's not getting better. One of the reasons I think why you see the fail fast movement be so successful.
Once you accept that failure is part of the process, once you abandon the "zero mistake" policy that many large organizations instill internally and externally you will begin to approach projects differently.
The truth is that "zero mistake" organizations make as many mistakes as everyone else, they just have the financial strength to ignore them as long as economy of scale works in their favor.
I could write forever about projects that went wrong not because the developers where bad but because the premise that fuels product development is broken.
I blame primarily business schools and large parts of academia for this. But it could extend all the way into the way the stock market is structured.
If you buy my premise that post-industrial is different than industrial age. That project definition is primary and time is secondary today. Then it does put some doubt at least in me about whether the stock markets focus on growth and Q's is sustainable.
Nature seems to be doing a good job as pacing various processes. It takes nine months to give birth to a child. One cell at a time. But the process is ongoing.
Nature is the ultimate continues deployment strategy.
It sounds like you've thought deeply about this - have you written more on your ideas here elsewhere? Would be interested to hear how this would work practically as well as your ideas on how the focus on perpetual growth hinders successful project delivery.
I'd love to see you write more on this as well. You've clearly thought about it prior to this conversation in a way that I don't think a lot of us have.
I think you will find reading Hayek and Coase to be rewarding.
Hayek introduced the idea that no one individual planner can make flawless plans because the information to do so is widely dispersed; instead success or failure in the market gives rapid feedback about how to allocate resources. Indeed the market is a discovery process that unearths this information in a way that a planner never could[1].
Coase asked the question: if this is so, how do large firms emerge? He identified the cost of transactions to be the key. The higher the transaction costs, the higher the cost of loosely coupled economies. The size of the firm is thus based on the relative costs of transactions (searching, identifying, validating, negotiating etc) vs the inevitable waste caused by planning.
In essence, large companies are islands of command economics in the sea of the market.
[1] In a related argument, Mises said that even if a planner could know all the variables the resulting problem would simply be too large to solve rationally.
The complexity is simply too high and it's not getting better. One of the reasons I think why you see the fail fast movement be so successful.
Once you accept that failure is part of the process, once you abandon the "zero mistake" policy that many large organizations instill internally and externally you will begin to approach projects differently.
The truth is that "zero mistake" organizations make as many mistakes as everyone else, they just have the financial strength to ignore them as long as economy of scale works in their favor.
I could write forever about projects that went wrong not because the developers where bad but because the premise that fuels product development is broken.
I blame primarily business schools and large parts of academia for this. But it could extend all the way into the way the stock market is structured.
If you buy my premise that post-industrial is different than industrial age. That project definition is primary and time is secondary today. Then it does put some doubt at least in me about whether the stock markets focus on growth and Q's is sustainable.
Nature seems to be doing a good job as pacing various processes. It takes nine months to give birth to a child. One cell at a time. But the process is ongoing.
Nature is the ultimate continues deployment strategy.
Edit: Fixed lame false modesty in the end!