That is hard to say and it would be a book worthy to explain what could come next.

All I know is that it is unsustainable.

The complexity is simply too high and it's not getting better. One of the reasons I think why you see the fail fast movement be so successful.

Once you accept that failure is part of the process, once you abandon the "zero mistake" policy that many large organizations instill internally and externally you will begin to approach projects differently.

The truth is that "zero mistake" organizations make as many mistakes as everyone else, they just have the financial strength to ignore them as long as economy of scale works in their favor.

I could write forever about projects that went wrong not because the developers where bad but because the premise that fuels product development is broken.

I blame primarily business schools and large parts of academia for this. But it could extend all the way into the way the stock market is structured.

If you buy my premise that post-industrial is different than industrial age. That project definition is primary and time is secondary today. Then it does put some doubt at least in me about whether the stock markets focus on growth and Q's is sustainable.

Nature seems to be doing a good job as pacing various processes. It takes nine months to give birth to a child. One cell at a time. But the process is ongoing. Nature is the ultimate continues deployment strategy.

We need time estimates so we can have an idea of what something will cost. If the estimate is too high, maybe we don't have time to build X, but we can can build Y instead because it takes less time.

Planning with no idea of how long something will take is higher risk. If your estimate is that it will take a week, I'll be OK. If you estimate 4 months, I worry because a lot more can go wrong in that 4 months, so now I have to think about contingencies for handling those problems.

My first job out of college did not estimate anything as far as I could see. We started projects, and they were done when they were done. If they took too long, we'd put them on hold and do something else. Of course, it meant that we couldn't do any advance marketing or pre-sales, because no one knew when project X was scheduled to be ready, so we probably lost a lot of sales. But there was no sales estimates, so no one knew that either...