Stop assuming that the competencies of today will be the competencies of the future [...] In disruptive situations, develop a process that focuses on people's ability to learn as opposed to whether they have the qualifications for the job, which almost by definition, they will not have.

I just read the essay In Praise of Expert Amateurs & Passionate Hobbyists, by Nicole-Anne Boyer, that starts from a review of The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, a book by Simon Winchester that chronicles the 70-years long developement process of the Oxford English Dictionary, and then moves to a broader analysis of the current commonly perceived unsustainability of long, open-ended projects.

Indeed, it's hard to image an OED-like project starting today and surviving given all the setbacks they experienced. Please let me know if I'm wrong about this -- I would be happy to be --but as Brand and others have documented long term projects are getting harder and harder to fund and sustain. However well-intentioned, a obsessive focus on "results" and "return on investment" for funders, regardless of sector, is precluding a whole range of projects from being initiated. So most projects' time horizon are measured in years, if not shorter. Forget anything that takes ten years or more. [...] What would it take then to make the Long View hip again?