In episode 23 of the Traction Heroes podcast, I sprung the following passage on Harry:
When you see a young and an old human, you can be confident that the younger will survive the elder. With something nonperishable, say a technology, that is not the case. We have two possibilities: either both are expected to have the same additional life expectancy (the case in which the probability distribution is called exponential), or the old is expected to have a longer expectancy than the young, in proportion to their relative age. In that situation, if the old is eighty and the young is ten, the elder is expected to live eight times as long as the younger one.
Now conditional on something belonging to either category, I propose the following (building on the so-called Lindy effect in the version later developed by the great Benoît Mandelbrot):
For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy. For the nonperishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy.
So the longer a technology lives, the longer it can be expected to live.
This is from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile, a book about resiliency. I wanted to discuss it with Harry because we’re in a time of rapid technological change, when many businesses are shifting budgets from people to technologies that haven’t stood the test of time.
But there’s a paradox here: organizations that want to last must evolve, and that sometimes entails investing in untested technologies. How do you skillfully navigate this paradox? Tune in to hear our thoughts.