A while back I blogged about clean starts. Basically, I said that, sometimes, you need a clean start to recover from a bad situation. After having given this some more thought, I have realized that what actually matters is the feeling of a clean start. Perhaps, in some cases, the only way to create that feeling is to do a full-blown clean start, scrapping everything and starting over (of course drawing from experiences gained the last time) – but generally, I think you can achieve the feeling of a clean start by far simpler, and cheaper means.
For instance, for a software project that feeling could be created by taking a timeout to discuss what’s wrong and find a new strategy – in which case the most important thing is that everybody agrees on that strategy. Clean starts can’t be forced upon people.
Sometimes a clean start can actually destroy the dynamics of the environment in question, as in the case of unslumming of cities (at least according to Jane Jacobs).