These are questions for wise men with skinny arms

I wrote this in 2015, but I’m publishing it now. It goes well with my theme of technlogical risk and business rewards. A unicorn company has embraced a technology that I’ve also been following for some time and now I’m becoming concerned with the technology’s perception if this company is to fail for reasons other than their technology choices. I’m hesitant to name the company and technology to jinx it, but it doesn’t change the general effect as I’m sure this applies to other emerging technologies that have their fates locked with an unrelated business.

Working to avoid wasting time can be worse than just wasting it. The pursuit of efficiency in high-scale projects pays immediate dividends, but the exploration lost in the process could negate any of the intended gains. Messy innovation often starts as ‘wasted’ time, but’s hard to know what’s really wasted without a larger context of the problem space. The ability to tolerate failures and take risks can be well worth the loss of some implementation efforts.

Looking at projects I’ve done, it’s easy to attach a story to each one. A learning experience in a technology, a leadership role, a support position, a miscommunication, an unmet expectation. It’s easy to look back and pull something valuable out of anything that I can remember. But what about all those experiences of which I have little memory of? Were those wasted like hours of sleep I couldn’t appreciate or did it just build into a story I haven’t yet told, or a story I don’t know how to tell.