MENTAL MODEL · M0015

Innovation Tokens

BusinessmediumManagement

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Version 1.0.0 · Updated 2026-07-30

CORE DEFINITION

In “Choose Boring Technology” (2015), Dan McKinley uses a limited supply of “innovation tokens” as a metaphor for a company’s capacity to handle unfamiliar technological risks. About three tokens is an approximation, not a measured limit. Unfamiliar technology consumes learning, operations, and debugging capacity that must be weighed against core business benefits.

SCAFFOLDING EFFECT

psychology

Reduce cognitive load

Restrain technical greed. It forces us to trade off between 'boring but stable' and 'novel but risky'. If tokens are spent on irrelevant tools, there will be no resources for innovation in core business.

anchor

Anchor fast decisions

Unfamiliar technology adds unknown failure modes, learning costs, and operational burdens as well as known drawbacks. The token metaphor makes limited capacity explicit and encourages evaluating additions across the whole technology portfolio. Mature technology often has better-understood risks, not zero risk.

MINIMUM ACTION

In progress 0/1

Practice this model in one real situation:

List one proposed technology and a mature alternative. Record business benefits, team experience, operational ownership, unknown failure modes, and rollback options for each. Check whether existing unfamiliar components already exhaust maintenance capacity, then decide whether the addition is worthwhile and set a review date.

Check to track your progress (stored locally)

Learning progress0%

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Source support: Explicit

link
lessannoyingbusiness.comhttps://www.lessannoyingbusiness.com/post/innovation-tokensZH · Explicit
verified
link
mcfunley.comhttps://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technologyEN
verified

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