There is often a wide gap between imagining a perfect design and executing it exactly as envisioned.
This is especially true for projects involving many people, such as hardware or software development.
Things rarely go as planned. Assumptions change, environments shift, and unforeseen variables inevitably emerge.
There’s a book called Big Things.
It introduces large-scale architectural projects that succeeded despite tremendous complexity.
What stuck with me most were two principles highlighted as key to those successes:
- Design carefully
- Execute quickly
The longer it takes to complete something, the more the variables will change.
That’s why we must design with care—but move swiftly when it comes time to implement.
The goal is to lock in the core structure before external conditions have a chance to shift.
To do that, modularize. Work in the smallest possible units that are least likely to be affected by change.
Yesterday, while walking through Kyoto, I was reminded of this.
There’s a local culture of using intersecting street names to describe destinations.
When giving directions to a taxi, saying “the corner of X Street and Y Street” immediately places you on a shared mental map—a kind of two-dimensional coordinate system understood intuitively by locals.
It felt as if the entire city, including its inhabitants, shared a built-in protocol for spatial communication.
That level of coordination must be the result of brilliant design.
Urban planning is vastly more complex than hardware design.
It spans generations, involves countless stakeholders, and is never truly complete.
And yet, the structure has endured.
Not because it was executed exactly as intended, but perhaps because it was designed to absorb change—or because its core ideas have continued to resonate.
A city like Kyoto wasn’t built at breakneck speed.
Perhaps the most fundamental layer was established rapidly at the outset, anchoring the rest.
Or perhaps there was a mechanism in place to prevent deviations at the implementation stage.
Maybe it was shared values—almost ideological—that compelled each generation to honor the original intent, reinforcing it through intrinsic motivation at the ground level.
I didn’t spend much more time thinking about Kyoto itself.
But the ideal relationship between design and execution—that’s something I’ve been rethinking ever since.