ESUG 2014, Cambridge. Thu, August 21, 2:00pm – 2:30pm Video Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vcoy5gwUvOA Video Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LrH9r4FNzY Abstract: This will a rather unusual talk for ESUG. The theme is not Smalltalk directly, but instead I discuss how progress and inventing new things fits with incremental, reflective nature of Smalltalk. People often argue that progress is only possible when you throw everything away and start from scratch. In this talk I will argue that this thinking is a trap and the only way for progress in practice is to take an incremental approach of constantly improving and therefore evolving the imperfect system you already have. I will show how the idea of creating feedback loops of improvement actually lead to non-linear growth and how this process of reflective constant improvement fits with the Smalltalk philosophy of incrementally and dynamically changing a running system.