The principle of Occam's Razor, also know as the Law of Parsimony, states roughly that, all other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best. I find that the approach of thinning things down to their essential core, eliminating distractions and side-shows, is a key element of success. It has application in many areas of designing products, running meetings, building businesses, and pretty much any other facet of life that you care to examine closely. Getting down to that core essential is not easy, it's a really difficult thing to do, which is why I think of it as the 'Art of the Minimum'. We humans are natural pack-rats, and we need to act against our natural inclinations to get to state of uncluttered purity. We second-guess ourselves all the time, and this leads us to pile on all kinds of extra stuff to act as a kind of safety net. But this Art is one well worth practicing.
Michaelangelo: "The more the marble diminishes, the more the statue grows."
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Here's a question: If you need to mail out 100 letters, is it faster to (a) take each letter in turn, sign it, fold it, stuff it in the envelop, seal the envelop, and put a stamp on it before moving to the next letter or (b) sign all 100 letters, then fold all 100 letters, then stuff all 100 envelopes, then seal all 100 envelopes, then stamp all 100 envelopes? Both get you to 100 letters ready to send, but which way gets you there faster? The majority of people would say (b) is faster -- that by focusing on doing a single task across your entire batch, before tooling up for the next task, you are more efficient. Well, the answer is (a). And it can easily be tested. With two equally skilled people doing the task, the person taking the (a) method will finish more quickly.
I got this from reading The Lean Start-up, which calls method (a) a 'small-batch' approach. Get your work done by taking a small batch (such as a single letter) all the way to completion before moving to the next batch. Not only is this faster to get the project done overall, but it also significantly reduces the risk in the project. For instance, if the seals on the envelopes are faulty and you need to get new envelopes, you find this out after 1 letter in method (a). Using method (b), you discover this when deep into the process and you will have to unstuff 100 faulty envelopes, setting you even further back on schedule. The Lean Startup applies this lesson to all kinds of activities in building a product and a business. From my own experience, I know this to be true. It is dramatically better to have a couple of things 100% done than to have dozens of things 80% done. In my startups we had a saying: "If it's not 100% done, it is 100% not done", and we used to say that all the time to each other to remind ourselves that "almost done", "mostly done", "kinda done", "done except..." just don't matter to customers. It has to be 100% done. You need to think binary: done / not done. Frankly I find that kind of binary thinking valuable in many things. So I encourage everyone to focus on taking the 1 or 2 most important things in front of you and get them done, get them out to customers. Focus on the smallest possible version of what you are doing that is viable, that you can be proud of, get it out, and then iterate to add more capabilities. If you have several projects to do, get the first one done before moving on to the next, so you don't end up with piles of half-done stuff. Small batches, completed. I have to admit, I have a few pet peeves. One of them is when a group of people start to speculate on a fact that they do not know, but could simply find out! It happens all too frequently: "it's possible", "no, it's not possible!", "it's red", "it's blue", "customers love it", "customers hate it". Facts can and should be looked up or tested in a simple experiment. No need to speculate about them. To paraphrase the famous Jim Barksdale quote: If we have facts, we'll use facts. If we have opinions, we'll use mine.
A few years ago, I came across a story that seems to have originally been reported in the book Art & Fear but has since been widely cited in a variety of other books and blogs. The story goes like this (my paraphrase): A pottery teacher divides his introductory pottery class into two groups. He tells the first group that for their final grade, they will need to make just one pot and it will be graded on how perfect it is, i.e. on quality. The second group he tells that he will grade them simply on the quantity of pots they make over the semester. The first group spends the course really planning out their perfect pots, thinking of how they will make something truly spectacular. The second group immediately starts cranking out pot after pot after pot. At the end of the term, the teacher in fact judges the quality of all the pots and demonstrates that the "quantity" group in fact had made better pots at the end of the term than the "quality" group. Of course the "quantity" students had spent the entire term practicing. By the end, their craftsmanship and inventiveness had naturally developed. The "quality" group on the other hand had spent all their time thinking about their great pots, but when it came time to make them, they were not that great -- after all, those were the first pots they had made... I find that nothing sharpens the mind and your sense of urgency better than preparing to demo your work to others. Feeling the heat of wanting to make a good impression on your audience really leads you to button up your presentation and think through the details.
When you are in an intense development period, you need to keep a super- tight process. And a key ingredient in keeping things tight is to demo your working software often. Getting the honest feedback that a demo invites is also a critical part of a tight process. I encourage everyone to demo their stuff as frequently as is feasible to whatever audience you can muster. My favorite project status update -- by far -- is getting a demo of working software, even if it is just a small piece of what will be a much larger whole before it is released to customers. Even just seeing that bare heart of your project beating away is magical. Having a customer first mentality has many ramifications.
It means that everything we do should be directed towards the single goal of delighting our customers. If what we are doing right now is not directed towards delighting our customers, we should stop and doing something that is. It means that we need to understand our customers really well, satisfy their wants, and anticipate their needs. It means that in any discussion or argument we may have internally, we should all turn and face the customer. If we are all focused on delighting our customers, then the discussion is no longer about me or you, about my agenda or yours. It is about how we work together to delight the customer. It means standing confidently and developing a true partnership of value exchange with our customers. One way I have of judging things in business is to look at them through the lens of a start-up. I imagine
that I have just started a new fledgling company, one I am funding out of my own pocket, and I ask myself "Would I do things this way in that start-up?", "Would I buy this technology?", "Would I hire this person?". I find this perspective brings things into sharp relief. It is a way of escaping the trap of local value systems, moving beyond incremental improvements, embracing a greenfield approach to thinking, and shunning business-as-usual mentality. Years ago, back in my start-up days, I came across another startup called Scient. They had very bold marketing, including a brochure that has stayed in my mind ever since. It was many pages that read "Business as usual. Business as usual." over and over again in a font that slowly faded out until it disappeared. Then it said, in clear letters, "Game over."
It was prescient of the fate Scient would suffer itself, and a good lesson for all. Sport climbing is mostly judged by the difficulty of the route climbed. But there is an offshoot of gym climbing called "Speed Climbing". As the name implies, it is a sport where the competition is to see who can climb up a relatively easy route the fastest. Years ago I read about speed climbing champion Hans Florine and I remember this quote from him: "I imagine I am throwing the holds to the ground."
This quote really resonated with me, as it is easy to imagine that mindset. I feel the same way about getting anything done. You need to grab the project and throw it behind you. That is, you want to get it done -- completely and well -- as quickly as possible. You want that project to be in your past. If you don't, if you hold on to them too long, then the next project comes along and suddenly you have two projects on our hands, and it becomes harder to throw the first project. Then more come along and next thing we know, you're juggling multiple projects at the same time and never get past any of them. If I may use another outdoor sports analogy: expedition-style adventure racing is basically a multi-sport endurance race. The "Eco-Challenge" is probably the most well-known of these. Top teams finish the course in roughly 36 hours, people at the back of the pack take 4-5 days, if they finish at all. I once saw an interview with a member of a champion team who said something like: "When I'm on the course, all I can think about is 'I have to get off this course as soon as possible! I don't know how those guys survive being on the course for 4 or 5 days. It's brutal. I would just die." Sometimes when we crave change, the effort can seem so daunting. We feel that the vast majority of people around us have a different view, and changing their minds is an impossible task. But, through history we see how individuals and small groups of people who are really passionate about an idea are able to ignite change that revolutionizes entire societies. Scientific research brings some light to this. It turns out that if 10% of a population believes very strongly in an idea, the rest of the population inevitably eventually comes to believe in that idea. Only 10%. So, changing the world is actually not that daunting, if you truly believe.
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AuthorPhilip Brittan is the General Partner of Crazy Peak LLC Archives
February 2021
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