First Principles Thinking

There is great power in simplicity. Complexity leads to more vulnerabilities and has more potential failure points. The most elegant solution is often the least complicated.

But don’t mistake simplicity for ease… It often takes much more time, effort, and thought to arrive at a simple conclusion. It’s exactly this thought that inspired the quote “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”

This is where I want to introduce the idea of ‘First Principles Thinking’. There’s often a lot of nuance and context that goes into solving a complex problem. The problem is, those details are often extra noise that drown out the main signal. ‘First Principles Thinking’ focuses on finding out what’s true in the mess of everything so that you can rebuild from an indisputable foundation. In other words, you must take a critical lens to separate assumptions from truth.

I’ve had a hard time understanding this but found it helpful liken it to communication. Embedded in what we say are both facts and opinions and the issue arises when we treat something that’s actually an opinion as a fact. 

Let’s take a manager speaking to an underperforming employee as an example. The ‘fact’ may be that there was a deadline for a specific project yesterday, and the manager did not receive it. The ‘opinion’ comes in suggesting reasons why that may be the case - they are irresponsible, they had a family emergency, they have too much on their plate, or maybe the manager just wasn’t looking in the right place for it. 

First Principles Thinking is a humbling approach to strip a single incident from what appears to be related parts, but actually are just bolted on as layers of assumption. And getting to that point of unbiased observations often leads to challenging the status quo, innovation, and more direct problem solving.

It mirrors the idea of ‘figuring out something that works’. We all want to make sure we're investing our time and energy in things that are producing results. The hard part is - everything works or could work. 

What we’re really interested in is finding things that work really well. That invites us to explore the specifics around what makes something work more than something else… Which gets us closer to the fundamentals of what really matters.

The best solution to a problem is the simple solution, and one of the most reliable ways to get there is through First Principles Thinking.

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