A Culture of Purpose: How to Choose the Right People and Make the Right People Choose You

Chapter 12Openness

When Ward Cunningham came of age as a computer programmer, the prevailing logic was that to create greatness in programming, you should lock yourself in a room and fully define your destination before starting to write code. And if that did not get you to the right place, lock yourself in the room longer.

But Ward's life was more than computers; he was also an avid reader. He read broadly and deeply the works of linguists, evolutionary biologists, architects, and philosophers. This reading bled into his view of programming. Everything Ward had learned about cultures and evolution and design suggested that there was a better, more iterative way to foster emergent design—a way that exploits distributed and unconscious knowledge. ...