The cost of mistakes

Over the holidays, I was playing with my niece. Like all the nieces and nephews of geeks, we were drawing pictures on my iPhone. We probably drew about 30 different pictures and didn't wear down any crayons or waste any paper (which was really a good thing since we were in the lobby of a very fancy hotel.) Ten minutes prior, we snapped about 50 pictures on a couple of different cameras. Most of the shots are terrible, but we didn't seem to care. There is almost no cost to these mistakes. There is almost no waste (except of course for some electricity.)

Technology is reducing waste in more areas than just in entertaining children . . . computers now design their successors and reduce the likelihood of expensive engineering mistakes, simulations are built of buildings to find architectural flaws before they are ever built, blog posts (like this one) allow people to write small snippets of thoughts that can be thrown away later if they don't measure up to later thinking.

In so many areas, the cost of making mistakes is going down due to the increasing infiltration of technology. And, of course, as the cost of mistakes decreases, the cost of innovation also decreases. Innovation is, after all, a series of testing out ideas and throwing out the bad ones. As the costs decrease, innovation in many areas of our lives is likely to pick up. While some of us are excited about this development, innovation necessarily means an increase in the rate of change in our organizations and in society at large. This reduced cost of mistakes is one of the many things increasing the rate of change . . . and increasing entertainment options for three year olds.