When Is "Good Enough" Good Enough?

Wired has a nice article ("The Good Enough Revolution") discussing various technologies that are technically a step backward, but functionally a step forward (e.g., MP3, the Flip video camera, the Predator UAV).

As the article points out, the shared key success factor is accessibility. The traditional engineering definition of a better mousetrap tends to focus on how well it catches mice, not on how easy/fun it is to configure, deploy, and empty.

For IT-intensive technologies, Moore's Law and standardization is allowing engineers to shift the focus of the design effort away from technical considerations and toward usability. Whether engineers are equipped to exploit this opportunity is unclear...most have little training (and often little interest) in the much softer challenge of understanding the social/cognitive use context.

So, when is "good enough" good enough? There's probably no general answer/heuristic...but the question may help engineers be more aggressive in pursuing minimalist/bare-bones solutions that revolutionize a use context with commodity technologies, instead of pursuing revolutionary technologies for commodity use contexts.

NCW Needs Cynefin

In the Summer 2009 issue of "Parameters" (U.S. Army War College quarterly), Gautam Mukunda and William Troy draw some interesting parallels between the recent worldwide financial crisis and Network Centric Warfare ("Caught in the Net: Lessons from the Financial Crisis for a Networked Future").

I blogged about a similar link between the financial crisis and SOA last fall (Distrust 2.0), focusing on the lack of transparency and the difficulty of maintaining trust when entities are built to be combined/linked in unanticipated ways.

Though the authors don't quite put it this way, much of the article seems to highlight the risks of using Analytical (i.e., Complicated/Knowable domain of Cynefin) tools to cope with a Complex domain. However, the authors lack the concepts/language to do more than make some helpful observations. Putting those observations into a Complex-Complicated framework would help highlight why NCW is more about sensemaking and "managing attractors within boundaries" (Snowden) than it is about analysis, model building, and simulation.

To be fair, the proponents of NCW who the authors criticize are the ones who are dangerously confused in not clearly distinguishing the Complex from Complicated. However,the authors' critique would be more rigorous if it was grounded in a framework like Cynefin.