The Idea and the Reality

A cynical culture declares every big idea a cover for interests; an ideological one demands that the idea be preferred to its living consequences. Both approaches exempt a favourite picture of the world from testing.

A building design is immaterial too. But without it, concrete takes a fairly free-form shape. Human rights, money, universities and states exist thanks to collective beliefs and produce entirely real consequences.

The problem is not ideas but how they are handled.

An idea becomes dangerous when:

• it is not allowed to lose to facts;
• a person is valued only as material for realising it;
• any damage is declared a temporary price of a great goal;
• doubt counts as a moral defect;
• supporters get the right to do what they forbid to others;
• failure is always explained by insufficiently pure execution.

A big idea simplifies a complicated world. It says who is to blame, where to go and why its supporters happen to be on the right side of history.

This feels good. Which is exactly why testing is needed.

Worth asking:

• what observation would change my mind;
• what consequences have already appeared;
• who pays the price;
• whether there is a mechanism for correcting a mistake;
• whether the system allows a reversal;
• whether part of the plan can be carried out and the result checked;
• what happens to those who disagree.

Ideas are for choosing a direction. Reality is for correcting the route.

The problem is not that people try to bring the world closer to their notion of better. Almost all of civilisation came about that way. The problem starts when the living world is required to lose to a beautiful notion at every point of disagreement.

Be especially careful with someone who never doubts, talks constantly about principles, and always discovers that his principles demand convenient actions from everyone around him.

But the cynic who declares every idea a lie falls into the same trap. He too has chosen a universal idea and exempted it from testing.

The mark of a living idea is that the conditions for abandoning it are described in advance. A company introducing a new accounting system can write down before launch: if order processing time doesn’t fall within a quarter, we go back to the old one. A company that didn’t write that down spends the next year explaining the failure by inadequate staff training, then by resistance on the ground, then by a misunderstanding of the plan. By then the system has cost money, abandoning it would cost someone their job, and the discussion, naturally, is no longer about the system.

Stating the exit condition takes one paragraph and gets written while nobody has yet tied their own reputation to the project. After launch it becomes impossible for reasons that have nothing to do with the idea.