Failure and flexibility
One thing I’m learning through my work with complex designs is that anytime you design a grand solution, especially a closed system, it’s going to fail as times change.
That’s both a cautionary and instructive lesson. Immediate failure is disappointing, but it’s worse to assume your once-successful solution will work forever. The world changes constantly, and any solution that is not flexible is certain to fail eventually.
> Managers who think there is one best company and one best set of processes set themselves up for destructive competition.
– [Wharton article](http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1594&CFID=32729929&CFTOKEN=21549897&jsessionid=a83085d8589f7d3d2814)
Adam Greenfield has a great [paper](http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/thinktank/greenfield_print.html) with many examples of products that weren’t designed with change and sustainability in mind.
Designers are often to blame for this short-sightedness. In our desire to find the *best* solution for a specific person and need, we design things that are so specific that they become useless when the world–or the person–changes. We also tend to focus only on the product, and not its growth plan or maintenance, missing the real problems with the system.
Pure technology solutions can actually be the best of all. They’re not designed for any particular use case, but if they’re designed well, they’re flexible and they can span for multiple use cases, kind of like the APIs that Greenfield mentions in his paper.
Brandon Schauer writes about this in [Simple systems for complex experiences](http://www.brandonschauer.com/blog/?p=44
):
> The challenge is designing a simple system of tools and rules that can address the complexity without becoming mired down in the complexity yourself.
Peter Merholz also addressed this design challenge in [a panel with Tim Brown from IDEO](http://www.peterme.com/archives/000793.html):
> Tim used the phrase “tools and rules” to describe what it is that we’re designing when we’re working on systems with emergent behavior. This can be a challenge for designers, particularly those who are trained in the design of form, of artifacts…
> We deliver a system at what is essentially a moment in time in the life of an organization, and, if this is a system predicated on emergent behavior, from that moment of delivery that system is moving away from our delivery. What is the value of a design consultancy in this situation? I think this is one of the reasons that Adaptive Path has pulled pretty strongly in an “experience strategy” direction. While the details of execution are likely to change with some rapidity, the overarching vision that guides the system has greater permanence, and if we deliver at that level, we can deliver longer-lasting value. We can help provide a strategy from which this system can evolve.