“Better, faster, cheaper!” was the enthusiastic if worn mantra of a CEO early in my career who was attempting to please stockholders and navigate to a public offering. The chant became so ubiquitous that the often unspoken response by those charged with achieving it was “pick two,” illustrating the confusion between process and goal. To get to “faster” and “cheaper” we first had to get the market to believe we had achieved “better” which wasn’t an equation we could solve for three variables at once. A few years later, a better fit was achieved to process and goal with a new mantra of “fail fast, fail early, fail often,” although the unspoken goal of “move forward” was often dropped by those trying to score a cheap laugh with a rejoinder of “mission accomplished”.
Fail fast, fail often, move forward isn’t a new concept, but saying the “F word (failure) was for our CEO of the time, and it underpins any advancement in knowledge, whether intellectual, social or emotional. This came to mind in a recent reading of David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers biography, where — personal quirks and eccentricities aside — the brother’s embrace of repeated failure — often involving the partial or total destruction of their flying machine prototypes (with attendant personal risk) — seemed to encourage rather than discourage them. Each crash or near-miss seemed to enervate them as proof that they were closer to a working solution. The puffery of “Failure is not an option” was actually the inverse of what they desired, looking to “Failure is the only option” to achieve advancement.”
So what does this have to do with a Protopia? A recent article revisiting this coinage — as the middle ground between a dystopia and a Utopia — posits that an active embrace of a constant state of positive prototyping to achieve happiness as a society — seems like a much more laudable goal, reflective of a view more nuanced than the polarized thinking the categories it tries to sit between represents. It embraces a pro-prototype, incremental approach at improvement (which necessarily is also introducing new problems to solve at the same time). This is inherently less dramatic and heroic in terms of a sound bite — “Let’s be incrementally better today!” doesn’t really raise the blood pressure — bur practically, it’s how all advances are made, regardless of what we skin it with later in history.
When my children were younger, I would often suggest them that when you are frustrated, that really means you are learning something new — and upset that it isn’t coming as easily to you as something you are already good at. The struggle as an adult is to understand that that feeling of frustration should be the thing you embrace because that’s where the growth happens. Orville and Wilber knew it intuitively — it was part of their tetchy nature.
Choosing the much more expansive grey over a black and white view of the world takes more time and thinking and isn’t what dominates the news cycle and much of the hyperbole in our current political climate. Dystopian sells better at the newsstand and is at our fingertips with the television clicker — and a Utopian goal is at best aspirational. But Protopian? There’s something undeniably optimistic and achievable about trying to make a little positive progress each day. Because those days add up. And ultimately may synchronize solving for better, faster and cheaper, whether that be in business resource terms or our emotional health.
Here’s a recent article to check out:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/14/special-series/protopia-movement.html?smid=url-share