I remember hearing of this before - I think it tells us a huge amount about how best to achieve our goals, or to coach others in that regard.
For example: ask a team to build a software project with excellent design and best practices and they may hit "analysis paralysis".
Ask them to build perhaps 5 distinct - but cheap and disposable - implementations and you might find they get a much better idea of how to do things "right" very quickly.
This appears to be an example of Facebook's "move fast, break things" axiom, or an example of "make it work, then make it good.
I'm not sure where the latter comes from, but I've read several startup case studies that began with founders who did everything by hand at the beginning (just to see if their process worked).
Sounds like a sure fire way to spend all the time on premature optimisation.
Scott Guthrie at Microsoft used to talk about rapid prototyping, and to always throw away the prototype code and redo from scratch. Never keep the prototype, and especially don't just push it straight into production.
Exactly my point! That's an excellent technique in fact, tell a team upfront this will not be allowed to evolve into production and, freed from unease about future plans, they'll explore and experiment much more openly.
For example: ask a team to build a software project with excellent design and best practices and they may hit "analysis paralysis".
Ask them to build perhaps 5 distinct - but cheap and disposable - implementations and you might find they get a much better idea of how to do things "right" very quickly.
Note to self: remember this for future use!