How do you make the best guess and get better ideas?
I talked about last week how we’re terrible at the first step in the scientific method: making a hypothesis. We never learn to do it. Here’s a few ways to do it better.
TELL YOURSELF THE STORY OF WHAT HAPPENED
We all have stories about why things happen in the world and in our lives. They can be really awesome stories. Whizbang beginnings, tense conflict, explosive endings. Elaborate backstories. Fifteen sequels.
Do they have anything to do with reality? Until we had the scientific method, we had no way to know. But now we do!
The fancy word for this is a root cause analysis, digging through the story to try and find the story that most closely matches the reality of what happened.
It is shocking how many big decisions people make their lives without the smallest bit of due diligence. They apply for graduate programs without ever talking to someone who’s gotten that degree or has the job they think they want. Or without talking to someone who has that job to make sure it’s something that sounds remotely palatable.
We spend more time delving into the restaurant we’re going to pick for dinner and reading up on reviews than we do on major business decisions or life decisions.
IDENTIFY BOTTLENECKS
This is another way to tell a more accurate story of what happened. Instead of delving deeply into the very beginning, you look for the biggest pain point right now, aka a bottleneck.
In my previous life, I was a project manager, and I came to know the importance of bottlenecks painfully and deeply. It’s the part of your process, whether you’re writing a book, baking something delicious, creating a giant website, getting a kid out the door, or whatever Herculean task you’re attempting that holds up everything else.
One business coach I follow, Danny Iny, insists that business growth is primarily ever about solving the next bottleneck. Whether you work for yourself or a company, you may think you have a ton of problems or a ton of opportunities, but there is always one primary thing tripping you up, and if you aren’t solving for that, you’re not moving forward.
USE ANALOGIES
From the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein, (I mentioned this before, BRILLIANT book), he talks about the usefulness of analogies. Sometimes novelty is even more useful than expertise.
InnoCentive lets companies post thorny problems that have stymied experts for anyone to try and solve and awards cash prizes to anyone who can figure them out. Most of the solutions come from totally unexpected industries. One dude solved the problem of how to clean up oil from the arctic by comparing it to how you get a slushy out of a cup with a straw. That little analogy netted him $20,000!
REMEMBER THERE’S NOISE IN THE SIGNAL
I spoke last week about the fact that we live in the wicked world of chaos and complexity, not the kind world of chess games and computer algorithms. One of the hardest things about the wicked world is that you may learn the wrong lessons from experience. Why did your campaign succeed? You have a good story, but it’s just a story. You will never really know.
As you make your next guess, acknowledge the fact that there may be irrelevant details in the data and key factors you understand that will similarly obscure why you succeed or fail the next time.
PUT IT TOGETHER
Do you want to do something new with your life? Or make your next idea successful?
- Before you commit to anything, tell the story of what’s happened so far, and then dig. Really dig back to learn as much about what happened as possible. If this is something new, dig back as much as possible into other people’s experiences.
- Focus in particular on bottlenecks. What is the one thing holding everything else up? You don’t need to be worrying about video editors if you don’t have a video camera.
- Don’t just focus on what you know or what the experts know. How can you compare this problem to things completely outside your usual experience or the expert’s experience? Quiz total amateurs which will force you to use analogies.
- Remember that there will always be noise in the data. This is the wicked world. If this were easy, a computer would’ve already figured out how to do it. There are things that you don’t know you don’t know and there are things that you think are important that are completely irrelevant and that WILL ALWAY BE THE CASE. There’s not much you can do to prevent that except be on the lookout for them so that you don’t at least learn the wrong lesson.
- Make a guess!
What do you want to try next? What do you want to learn? This can be so much fun!