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:
- Variation: “seek out new ides and try new things”
- Survivability: “when trying something new do it on a scale where failure is survivable”
- Selection: “seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along
Note that “Selection” in this case is akin to Darwin’s ideas of evolutionary selection, not prioritisation of future work.
What Palchinsky realised was that most real-world problems are more complex than we think. They have a human dimension, a local dimension, and are likely to change as circumstances change.
– Tim Harford, Adapt
Nothing of Palchinsky’s actual writing survives today, as he was arrested and likely murdered by the Soviet secret police in 1928 for publicly arguing against large-scale construction projects with ill-defined objectives and “sabotaging Soviet industry by trying to set minimal goals”. Harford says, “In other words, Peter Palchinsky was murdered for trying to figure out what would work, and for refusing to shut up when he saw a problem”. Palchinsky’s life is documented in the book The Ghost of the Executed Engineer by Loren Graham, which is also serves as the primary reference for Harford’s work. The “Palchinsky principles” are never laid out clearly in that book, but instead they are Harford’s synthesis from the stories laid out in Graham’s book.
Applying the Palchinsky Principles to Product Management
The Variation principle directs product managers to have lots of ideas, expecting that many (if not most) will fail to deliver value. It calls for plans and roadmaps that have various options and alternative ideas to solve the same problem, so that when one idea fails, others are ready to try. Hierarchical planning methods such as Impact Mapping, Opportunity Solution Trees or GIST boards are potentially good ways to visualize the problem and the solution options.
The Survivability principle calls for iterative delivery with relatively low-risk solution slices, so that a bad idea doesn’t necessarily ruin the whole plan. With GIST, steps to increase confidence make this approach explicit. With Impact Mapping, slicing on value can help create smaller experiments from larger problems. From a more general approach, this means approaching delivery as a set of experiments, and evolving the practice of experimentation for product delivery.
The Selection principle calls for selecting good leading indicators of value, measuring progress towards the goals using those indicators, and using feedback to choose which ideas to keep and which to throw away after they have been tried. In The 4 Disciplines of Execution model, this effectively relates to the second and fourth disciplines. From a more general approach, this means selecting good Overall Evaluation Criteria for delivery experiments. With Impact Mapping, this means having clear expected behaviour changes defined for each impact, and then measuring the success or failure of deliverables against that criteria. In the GIST model, having the North Star metric that tracks expected value delivered to the market allows us to accept or reject ideas as we work towards the steps for increasing confidence.
Learn more about the Palchinsky Principles
- Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, ISBN 978-1250007551, by Tim Harford (2012)
- The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union, ISBN 978-0674354371, by Loren Graham (1996)