All advances are by breaking the rules
One subject that comes up a lot in these letters and in my conversations with folks is the idea of disruption, and “disruptive innovation”. I am a fan, and always have been. But why is that? Why is any kind of disruption, experimentation, willingness to fail, etc. to be considered “good” at all? Why don’t we just stop, and enjoy what we have, or go back to something else? Why do we encourage risks, fund it with venture capital, celebrate ambitious founders?
There are lots of opinions here, and lots of folks talk about reasons to be optimistic (or pessimistic) about technology (and change in general). It’s certainly true that not all change is good, and there are better and worse ways to approach disruption. But why support it at all?
For me, the answer is very urgent, and very fundamental - and it’s contained in the title of this post. Every single thing that we have, collectively, invented - starting with fire, and moving up to <pick your tech of the day> was, until it was done for the first time “not the way we do it”. Maybe there wasn’t an explicit rule against it (though usually there was), but there was at least orthodoxy, perhaps dogma, and often social pressure.
For many of these changes, there was no permission, and often extreme social pressure against them (pace Galileo). This will always be the case, there will always be those who can’t or don’t want to understand new things. Sometimes they’re in positions of power and they can block the new ideas - it’s been said that science advances “one funeral at a time” for this reason. We have to wait for the senior scientists who adhere to old dogma to retire or die off before new paradigms can be established.
Nothing improves without changes and experiments, and there are no experiments without failures. One way of looking at evolution is that “life is 4 billion years of mistakes”. Every single genetic change that has “advanced” life on earth was a mistake of some kind in the transcription of genetic code. We kept the ones that were happy mistakes (fitter), and the unhappy ones didn’t survive.
So, there is almost a moral dimension or imperative for me, to invention. We are almost obliged to poke at the status quo, ask questions, try new things, challenge “the way things are done”. I am very far from being a political scientist, but this seems to me to also be a big part of why freer and more open societies tend to move faster and create more wealth - if there is a single authority saying what can and can’t be done, you’ll never take the risks and make the mistakes you need to improve. No one is always right - this goes for managers too. If you don’t build a culture where you can be challenged as a leader, you’ll leave a lot of value on the table.
There is a line, for sure. Breaking rules doesn’t mean breaking laws or causing active harm. We are aiming for positive sum, not zero or negative. But it is literally true that we can’t get better without trying new things. Disruption, innovation, experimentation, and failure are as important to us as breathing is, and as fundamental.