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Designed to fail

warning

This is an early draft and isn't yet up to our standard. You can contribute improvements.

You deliberately create or champion a market initiative that looks promising but is flawed by design. For example an open standard with no governance, a half-baked reference implementation, or an underfunded “community” project.

The goal is to occupy the space so others don’t, then let it collapse. It’s denial through decay.

Useful when you sense a threat emerging in a space you don’t want to contest.

Consider: are you backing something that only looks viable? Could you be caught in someone else’s design-to-fail?

  • Creating artificial needs (User Perception): A design-to-fail initiative often hinges on hyping something no-one really needs.
  • Open Approaches (Accelerators): Design-to-fail often pretends to be open, but subtly discourages real adoption.
  • Sweat & Dump (Dealing with toxicity): You might “gift” a flawed initiative to others and let them fail with it.
  • Creating centres of gravity (Attacking): A toxic centre of gravity can attract and trap competitors.
  • Insertion (Poison): Often used in tandem—push bad direction and steer others into it.