In my adult life I have been part of several innovative organizations that push frontiers of science, technology, and human organization. It is truly an amazing experience to be part of a team and movement that pushes the frontier of progress in humanity!
However, the biggest advances in humanity typically have not happened within a single team. They tend to happen over decades with dozens or hundreds of teams contributing to the cause. For example, Medicine, Space Travel, and Decentralized Money are all pursuits that fit this description.
1. The Idea of Incrementalism
Incrementalism is a concept that describes how human progress comes out of the organic process of teams of people blundering forward together in pursuit of a larger vision/set of goals, not always knowing exactly what they want or how to get there, not always succeeding in the short-term at every step, but over the medium-term and long-term showing cumulative progress that can be extraordinary.
Incrementalism is much more about figuring it out as you go, trial-and-error learning, and wisdom that comes through empirical experience than it is about planned and calculated success.
If a community of people is able to stay connected and establish the inspiration and work-processes to create a hive-mind or collective intelligence all united and working together in pursuit of a common goal, and if they have a way of integrating their common progress via a larger framework (e.g. Shared File System, Scientific Journals, Github etc), then incredible progress can be made over a few years or decades of collaboration and hard work.
When there is an entire ‘field of organizations’ including competitors, collaborators, and spinouts all pursuing progress in a similar domain for a decade or more, then progress can be dramatic! As examples, please consider the industries that led to the creation of the internal combustion engine, aviation, the silicon chip, the personal computer, photography, and movies!
2. Wikipedia Definition
Here is a terrific definition of Incrementalism that is worth reading – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incrementalism.
Personally, I find the following idea contained in the definition to be incredibly powerful: “This was the theoretical policy of rationality developed by Lindblom to be seen as a middle way between the rational actor model and bounded rationality, as both long term goal driven policy rationality and satisficing were not seen as adequate.”
3. Examples of Human Progress through Incrementalism
Consider the process of early master craftsmen slowly widening the ‘arch’ for aqueducts, cathedrals, coliseums, and other architectural structures thousands of years ago… until, whoops… the structure would cave-in, and then it would be necessary to move the dead bodies aside (literally!). Go back to the safer and narrower design of the arch, and avoid repeating the same error again. This is an example of early incrementalist progress in the field of structural engineering.
Over the past 200 years, all of the scientists in a field like biology or physics, slowly finding truth about our bodies and the world we live in through observation, analysis, and experimentation and then building out cumulative scientific knowledge within communities of peer reviewers published in the academic journals — this is another example of long-term incrementalism at work allowing an entire field of progress to be accomplished.
In the American justice system, the courts built out our system of case law one judicial opinion at a time, building on top of the American constitution (i.e. the core set of values — codified into a formal institution — on which the society rests), and with revisions through the supreme courts when the lower courts get it wrong, we slowly continue to advance. This is another case of the principle of incrementalism at work to allow societal-level progress.
The community of US congressional representatives building out public policy through the system of passing bills, at the National level and in the ‘farm leagues’ of the 50 states, slowly learning through empirical experience, which policies work, which policies fail, which work so well such that they should be copied and rolled out at national scale. This is yet another example of incrementalism at work.
A small software company with 20 core employees working tirelessly for several years toward an envisioned system, after many major re-factors of the system and components, with an architecture that is one of a kind, refactored, and rebuilt half-a-dozen times! You could say that the team’s first half-a-dozen attempts were failures, but now on the 7th attempt the system has been working miraculously for 18 months, is scaling rapidly, and is on track to power 90% of the transactions in an entire industry — so, failure, or success? This too is incrementalist progress. Was anyone on this team a genius to figure out such a great accomplishment? Well, surely there were a few geniuses present. But clearly nobody was smart enough to get it right the first time. And the outcome is the product of the hive mind of intelligence of the collective. And likely the final result ended up being calibrated in a way that was quite different from initial instincts. This is a case of a team succeeding through the process of incrementalism.
4. Incrementalism & Human Progress
Incrementalism is founded on the core value that “we can do better!”
When I was a much younger engineer, I would try and figure out the right answer and make leaps in progress through the power of my own intelligence. But, now as I grow older, I’ve learned that creating the “conditions for incrementalist progress”, and, especially, harnessing the hive-mind of a diverse team with an array of special gifts where everyone is empowered to contribute in their area of gifting, may be the most important things we can do to pave the way for maximizing human progress in a domain.
If we believe “we can do better”, and if we create the teams, incentives, and conditions for incrementalist progress, it is possible for humanity to advance!
5. Incrementalism & Blockchain Communities
Blockchain and cryptocurrency is another ‘field level’ innovation phenomena, with hundreds of smaller organizations participating in a greater human cause to push the frontier of technology, governance, and human organization through incrementalist process.
Once we scratch below the surface of human greed present in so many blockchain projects, I believe the deep psychological impetus for this trend to create a startup to pursue blockchain and cryptocurrencies is a passion present amongst an entire generation of founders for individual autonomy and self-sovereignty, the right balance of privacy and transparency, and also a generational backlash against increasing centralization, censorship, and distrust caused by large governments, corporates, and the church. This is the shared mission that unites the larger community in the incrementalist pursuit.
Blockchain technologies that have already created self-sovereign communities (eg. Cosmos, Decred, Terra, Tezos), or that allow the future creation of self-sovereign communities via governance frameworks for stakeholder-based approvals of proposals and spending by the community fund (eg. Tendermint, Parity Substrate), are set-up with the principle of incrementalism in mind, to support a community of builders around the idea of incrementalist progress.
These new community-based models of administering dozens of smaller projects all connected towards a larger goal could support 25 years or more of continuous evolution with dozens of contractor teams serving the protocol community and both collaborating and competing towards the larger vision of community-self governance, establishment of crypto-institutions, and creation of a sustainable digital economy with public services for members.
These projects can use open source engineering management tools on Github to integrate technical progress from multiple teams towards the vision. These projects have decentralized proposal frameworks so that contractors with good ideas can share them, good-ideas can percolate up through community polling and consensus, and the power of the hive-mind can be harnessed towards carrying progress forwards in a smart, fast, and adaptive way.
In this regard, the founders of these key blockchain projects have created brilliant infrastructures for the pursuit of both decentralized and incrementalist progress. Within the Decred ecosystem, the Politeia governance system was an ‘Incrementalists dream come true,’ and perhaps the first of these private key-based signing systems for expressing freewill in both polls and votes about important proposals and decisions re the future of the community and the project.
The fact that community-members can express their free will anonymously via their private-key means they can be honest in their assessments and voting without fear of retaliation or retribution from other community-members, which is another benefit of the community-based voting system.
Running a human process of incrementalism involving millions of token holders who are voting to award sub-projects to hundreds or thousands of individuals who are part of the contractor apparatus, towards the pursuit of sound money and new institutions to support global humanity, is a pursuit worthy of many lifetimes of human effort, especially for those of us who share the values of liberty, autonomy, privacy, and economic self-sovereignty.
Community-led blockchain projects are not just about technology, they are about creating new and better institutions, founded on values of non-violence, within new communities of incrementalist progress!
This is why these communities will succeed in the end: the adaptive community-based governance model harnessing the principle of incrementalism can support a continuous, organic, emergent, community-based model of driving progress forward, which formalizes beautifully the primary means by which humans have driven science, technology, and public policy forward for the past millenia: Incrementalism!
As one example that excites me a lot: We can use these new governance tools to harness the hive-mind of millions of people globally to create and fund proposals, and hire contractors, to tackle the problem of climate change!
As a global community we can develop experience and learn together, and incrementally advance!
Let’s take humanity to new places!
Humanity 3.0 