Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure : Cafe Set
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Customer Review :
A Blueprint for Adapting : Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure
Adapt is a well written book with compelling examples that covers, in my opinion, the single most foremost topic in how to think about thinking:
To a first approximation, rational deduction fails 100% of the time, when applied to the messy real world. The Only path to success is to try, fail, and adapt.
The examples are engaging, the writing is pleasant, and there are soundbites throughout that are wonderful. My favorite in the second half of the book was a joke development fun of self-help and company books.
The flow of the book goes roughly:
1. What's the likelihood of getting something wrong? (~100%)
2. What can we do? (Feedback + Adaptation)
3. What about situations where we have to get it right (Nuclear power plants?)
4. How do organizations adapt (Low central control).
5. How do individuals adapt (It's hard).
The book was commonly very strong. The range of examples throughout was particularly impressive. Anyone who doesn't already understand the idea that we all are wrong up front most of the time should have this book stapled to their hands. Considering myself well read in this space, I saw a new example I was unfamiliar with every third page.
Among my favorite of the exiguous examples that I was unfamiliar with:
Paul Ormerod ran math models of corporate extinctions that lined up pretty well with math models of species extinctions. However, the math models only worked (had decent predictivity) if the assumption was that none of them were any good at all at predicting the future:
"It was potential to build a model that mimicked the real extinction signature of firms, and it was potential to build a model that represented firms as gradually prosperous planners; but it was not potential to build a model that did both."
2-3 years ago, I finished that there was a wide open store for a book on the twin topics of ubiquitous error and feedback. I started a blog partly because the topic needed addressed, and it hadn't been addressed in the contemporary literature. Indeed, it was contradicted by most of the contemporary discussions. On any topic.
This book is truly the most foremost of the contemporary big idea-books. Malcolm Gladwell's minor insights are tiny details in comparison.
Quibbles:
I was less than impressed by his treatment of point 3 above...but I'm less than impressed by my treatment of the topic as well...I don't think there is a good answer, and while Harford seems to admit as much at the end of the episode (6), the rest of the episode seems to be attempting to recommend a solution.
If I had written the book...I'd have pulled in 2 supplementary topics:
What does this mean for government?
My favorite prior thinkers in this direction are: John Boyd, W. Edwards Deming, and Kent Beck, and Frederich Hayek. Only Hayek is referenced, and lightly.
Minor quibbles aside...the book is required reading.Please Check Update Here!!
