Incrementalism

It's long been held in social and political life that getting things done requires a hard-headed approach. Although the literature shows that a 'nice first, then tit-for-tat' approach is a winning game rule in most cases, this is sometimes spun to show that the last person to act in a heavy-handed way should win.

This is very close to deficit thinking, by which I mean a philosophy of life in which avoiding losses is better than achieving gains, and in which risk avoidance trumps risk-taking. It is also somewhat related to the idea of achieving incremental gains (sums of very small increments, like an integration problem in calculus) as opposed to higher-risk quantum gains (large jumps, but be careful that you land safely).

But the long-term payoffs are interesting to see. Because human faith and sight are limited, we tend to look at the near horizons, like bacteria in petri dishes. Contrary to this, the fact is that if we leap out of the petri dish, we will find it hard to ever go back. This is the key point about long-term payoffs in optimistic strategies: that if you succeed, there will not be sufficient losses to bring you back to square one. On the other hand, short-term payoffs with pessimistic strategies tend to keep you mired in the petri dish.

One last caveat though: great leaps forward can often be traumatic. There is often an 'implementation dip' and this may be followed by a short-sighted purge of the leading strategists. Some years later, as abundant gains develop, these gains are then consolidated incrementally, with the incrementalists taking the credit for the abundance.