An idea can fail in any number of ways

For an idea to succeed, it must avoid all possible shortcomings. Any number of shortcomings could bring about its failure.

Leo Tolstoy began his novel Anna Karenina with the famous opening line “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Out of this notion Jared Diamond popularized the “Anna Karenina principle,” which holds that any one of several shortcomings can guarantee the failure of an idea, while success depends on avoiding all possible shortcomings. Scaling is, in the end, a weakest-link problem: the endeavor is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain.
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There are multiple ways an idea can fail at scale, and to achieve high voltage, you must check each of the Five Vital Signs: false positives, misjudging the representativeness of an initial population or situation, spillovers, and prohibitive costs. Any one of these alone can sink your ship.^[1]

#strategic #paradigms

See also:

• Paradigms can have phenomenal longevity
• Paradigm shifts create a new framework of thinking
• Paradigm shifts reconstruct the field from new fundamentals