How to Reduce Risk in Prototyping

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I think a really key thing about prototyping is about reducing risk. It's like by creating the fake Palm Pilot out of a block of wood, he was able to test a hypothesis dramatically faster and cheaper than if he actually had to build one at a plastic let alone make one that actually works. If you can focus on gathering information about whatever the biggest risks are, that's actually a very efficient way to find out quickly if the project's viable.

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What are "shed" and "cake" projects? And how can you avoid "shed" projects? What is the "jobs to be done" framework? What is the "theory of change" framework? How can people use statistics (or statistical intuition) in everyday life? How accurate are climate change models? How much certainty do scientists have about climate change outcomes? What are some promising strategies for mitigating and reversing climate change?

Cassandra Xia (@CassandraXia) is the creator of Adventures in Cognitive Biases and co-founder of the non-profit Work on Climate. She is fascinated by how human biases affect the actions we take as a society and how to hack human psychology to get the change that we want. She is previously affiliated with the MIT Media Lab, MIT CS department, and Google AI. More of Cassandra's work can be found at cassandraxia.com and workonclimate.org.

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