Traction Heroes Ep. 39: Pace Layers

AI lets us prototype faster than ever before. That’s great, as long as you remember there’s underlying work to be done. Specifically, production systems require structural underpinnings “screen-level” prototypes often miss. This means that (ironically) prematurely-rich prototypes can impede traction. So I wanted to discuss these issues with Harry. I kicked things off with a reading from Stewart Brand’s The Clock of the Long Now: In recent years a few scientists (such as R. V. O’Neill and C. S. Holling) have been probing a similar issue in ecological systems: How do they manage change, and how do they absorb and incorporate shocks? The answer appears to lie in the relationship between components in a system that have different change rates and different scales of size. Instead of breaking under stress like something brittle these systems yield as if they were malleable. Some parts respond quickly to the shock, allowing slower parts to ignore the shock and maintain their steady duties…