Strong Towns

2Incremental Growth

Take a tentative step in the dark. If you do not run into something, you just gained knowledge. If you hit a wall, the incremental nature of your advance gives you wisdom without much lost.

Now take an abrupt leap in the dark. The gain may come at a more rapid pace, but the risk of breaking your nose is far greater. Even if successful, it is unlikely you can repeat this trick many times without serious calamity.

When there are an unknowable number of variables and feedback loops that react to and ultimately impact what we do, and when calamity is not an outcome we are willing to risk, the way to probe uncertainty is through incremental change. This is exactly the approach embodied in the traditional development pattern.

Complex, adaptive systems grow incrementally. That is the method they use to simultaneously harmonize multiple competing interests, to learn – through experimentation – what truly works and what doesn’t.

Each part of the system receives feedback to changes as they happen. Each part responds to positive and negative stressors, adaptations that impact every other part of the system. It is an approach predicated upon failure – preferably small, early failures – as a path to wisdom.

My hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota, was founded in the years immediately following the Civil War. There is a photo I obtained through our historical society that shows an early iteration (Figure 2.1). It’s a series of little pop-up shacks arranged in a line next ...