How innovators think
Cristian Sánchez
Senior Product Manager @ Psi Mammoliti 🤹🏼♀️ | Professor & Content Creator 🤓 | Founder @ Lumi 🚀
Let me introduce you to this topic with a seemingly simple question: What is the difference between a chef and a cook?
One could argue that chefs are able to produce more sophisticated and high-end dishes. But, with strong practice, the cook may be capable to reach that level of mastery too. Both of them could create delicious dishes.
Rather than a state-of-the-art culinary experience, the main difference relies on a blank sheet. The chef creates a recipe and the cook follows a recipe. Chefs can create dishes from scratch because they know the properties of each ingredient and how to combine them in order to maximize flavor and delight. Cooks know a lot about implementation, but they lack a true understanding of how raw ingredients contribute to the final result. They create something that has been already created or stick to a recipe with subtle variations.
There are two ways of thinking implied here. For short, the cooks reason by analogy while the chefs reason by first principles. Reasoning by analogy doesn't conceive a true understanding of a given subject. So, if the cooks lost their recipe, they should rely on their memory, otherwise, they won't be able to create the dish. They have no real knowledge about how things get created. Said so, they can't accurately recombine the initial ingredients in order to optimize a given dish or create a new one.
Leaving behind the example, let's introduce what first principle thinking is all about.
First principle thinking is achieved by looking at the root causes of a given phenomenon. It's about finding the ultimate truth about something, a final statement where you can't continue digging deeper. The only way to understand the big picture is to really know what's inside of it. We reach an understanding of how things are composed by asking why things are as they are shown to us repeated times. We think in first principles by being curious, obsessively observant and eager to learn deep.
The foundation of SpaceX by Elon Musk was assisted by first principles of thinking. The costs associated with spaceship and rocketry manufacturing and deployment were so prohibitively expensive that they could discourage anyone. But he reimagined the industry from its fundamentals. He understood the underlying causes of high prices so he could efficiently bypass them and create a better solution.
I don't want to leave implied the notion that analogy reasoning should be avoided at all costs. Few things in life tend to be absolute truths, and context here plays a determinant role.
As the title of this publication suggests, if you are searching for true innovation in a given area to solve an important problem, reasoning by analogy will hinder your capacity to reimagine brave new solutions and reinvent the wheel when it's needed.
Knowledge by analogy is a fragile one. A business without a complete understanding of its underlying assumptions could be developing tons of ideas by accident. This leads to an increased risk of failure and a waste of resources.
Culturally speaking, business analogies are especially dangerous since:
- They impede brand new initiatives to flow freely around the company.
- They foster copycatting successful solutions in the market.
- They dissociate us from our business reality by thinking from others' perspective
Great ventures have been born from non-conformist original thinkers that don't rely on improvisation nor imitation.
They find a problem and break it down into its foundational components. They do a careful observation and analysis of these smaller parts to understand its current state. Then, they re-organize them to unlock the initial constraint and generate a truly insightful solution.
I hope you get a sense of the difference between these cognitive processes. In my opinion, outstanding value is created by a true knowledge of the foundational elements of the problem we care to solve.
If this topic is of your interest, here are some useful links for further information: