A theme that seemed to run through Reboot7 was the advocacy of taking small steps over theorising. David Heinemeier Hansson, who built web application Ruby on Rails, stressed the advantage of getting something basic up and running fast. In a presentation on The Skype Brand, Malthe Sigurdsson talked about getting out frequent, small revisions.
Pretty closely related was the idea of ordinariness and “good enough” solutions. David Weinberger championed “good enough” knowledge classifications; Skype favoured simple language (“Talk” not “VOIP”).
Both these are central concepts in Improv – it’s good to advance the action; and it usually works much better to say the obvious, ordinary thing, instead of trying too hard to come up with a brilliant one-liner. It was good to hear this backed up by the experience of some of these impressive innovators.
[UPDATE: Scoble has more to say on this]
