Grasping Complexity with Both Hands

I really enjoyed this talk, Grasping Complexity with Both Hands (outline), by Glenn Vanderburg. Here are a couple of his ideas that I found really thought-provoking:

New idea doesn’t have to be perfect to be good. Don’t dismiss them as soon as you find a single flaw.

How to make decisions in the face of truly complex problems:

• Don’t think in terms of right and wrong solutions. Think in terms of costs, benefits, and risks.
• Don’t expect a perfect and complete answer. Try to find 80/20 solutions.
• Don’t expect to find a perfect, simple solution that covers all edge cases and all possible things that can go wrong. Ways to tackle this:
  • Solve the common case optimally, and accept sub-optimal solutions for the edge cases.
  • Don’t try to predict everything that will go wrong and prevent it. Instead create good feedback loops so that you can respond when something actually does go wrong.