Palchinsky Principles
In the book Adapt, Tim Harford lays out three key principles for adaptive planning, explaining them as the problem-solving approach of Peter Palchinsky. Palchinsky was a civil engineer in charge of several huge infrastructural projects in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, who in the early 20th century intuitively applied what would today be called iterative delivery, systems thinking, optionality and experimentation with feedback cycles. The three Palchinsky principles are important because they succinctly capture the essence of most modern successful product development approaches.
According to Harford, Palchinsky approached wicked problems by trying out new things in expectation that some ideas will fail, and because the failure will be common it’s necessary to make it survivable. Finally, it’s critical to actually know when a plan starts failing, so it can be adapted to the new circumstances. He formulates this approach in three principles:
Note that “Selection” in this case is akin to Darwin’s ideas of evolutionary selection, not prioritisation of future work.
