Avoid rigid thinking by Jimmy Wales
Extract from Lessons Learned – Straight talk from the world’s top business
leaders - Sparking Innovation
50 Lessons (Harvard Business Press) £6.49
www.FiftyLessons.com
The history of Wikipedia can tell something about rule breaking having great
impact. Before Wikipedia I had a project called Nupedia. Nupedia had the
same broad vision, the same idea that excited people, which was to create a
free encyclopaedia for every single person on the planet, in their own
languages. That broad, unifying idea got a lot of people excited, and they
came in to start working on this.
The model we designed at that time was very top-down. There was a seven-stage
review process in which people had to fax in their degrees so that they
could prove their credentials. The process was very old fashioned, but it
was also old-fashioned for a reason. It wasn’t old-fashioned just because we
wanted to be old-fashioned; it was old-fashioned because we thought that’s
how you would build an encyclopedia. This was a complete failure. We put a
ton of money into it and two years of really hard work, and we had very
little to show for it.
Then we discovered the wiki editing idea, which had been around for several
years at that time. Wikis were an online phenomenon. [But they were]
low-key. A few programmers were using wikis; it was a subculture.
Harnessing that idea and saying, “Okay, let’s take this completely radically
open thing and start building an encyclopaedia with that,” was really
contrary to everything that we previously thought would work. And it grew -
we didn’t just randomly decide it - but of my frustration in talking with
the volunteers who were trying to build the encyclopaedia. What’s wrong? Why
is it taking so long? So I said, “Let’s just blow all that away and have a
totally open-ended model instead of a priori figuring out what we think the
right path is. Then, as we see problems arise, we’ll think about how to
solve them.”
As it turned out, partly because our community grew out of the dot-com crash,
there was no funding. Anytime a problem arose where we naturally thought we
needed to have staff members to do X or Y, there were no staff members. We
had to evolve ways for the community to do it. That’s what really led us, as
an ever-growing and large group, to this model of radically open-ended,
radical content generation by the general public. One of the main lessons
that I draw out of the story of the transition from Nupedia to Wikipedia is
to avoid excessive a priori thinking. We had a lot of ideas about what this
project would look like, how we would create an encyclopaedia, and tried to
a priori design the whole thing to match that preset idea. It turns out we
were wrong about several things and right about a few things. The excessive
a priori thinking led us to believe we had to proceed in a certain route,
which we didn’t.
The lesson that I learned from that is, whenever possible, if you don’t have
to make a decision today, then don’t. Wait. Leave things open-ended and try
to pursue a path so that you can make that decision at a future juncture
when you need to. This has a broad applicability in many contexts. If you a
priori imagine everything and then you pursue it in a very rigid way, you
can get off track before you can realize it and never get back.
Takeaways
Top-down models and old-fashioned processes can stifle innovation. In such
cases, breaking the rules can have great impact.
Develop an open-ended model instead of a priori figuring out what you think
the right path is. Solve problems as you encounter them.
If you don’t have to make a decision today, then don’t. Make those decisions
in the future, when you need to.
