Dark alleys and failing faster

Two great posts about the inevitable outcome that things aren't going to work out as planned, both at a product and a company level. First Gmail creator Paul Buchheit about the need for an attitude of humility with continous iteration. Then Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures about why early stage venture investments fail, with 2/3 of realized investments having made complete or partial transformation during the time of investment. Also from this post:

My friend Dick Costolo, co-founder of FeedBurner, describes a startup as the process of going down lots of dark alleys only to find that they are dead ends. Dick describes the art of a successful deal as figuring out they are dead ends quickly and trying another and another until you find the one paved with gold.

Why the dark alleys? Well, that's a good metaphor for the complexityof forecasting and developing new businesses and products. Perhaps the tendency of humans to have inflexible mental models, revised stepwise only when the cost of not revising it gets to big, is a drag on the developments in new businesses.

So one conclusion on how to handle the dark alleys could be based on the motto "fail faster" - almost like an evolutionary development with lots of iterations, adaption to the environment (i.e. customers and competetitors) and quick shutdown of "dead ends". And the mental models? The book "The Opposable Mind" by Roger Martin (dean of Rotman School of Management) covers this brilliantly, but that's for another post.