simplifying the problem, or, how one Tyler Cowen question can take you to a new dimension
Tyler Cowen is one of the best interviewers in the business. One of the question types he relies on that I really like is, “explain x / the reasons for x in the fewest dimensions possible.” A recent example:
“Ecuador seems to be moving backwards on the political front, including violence, corruption, and electoral problems. In the smallest number of dimensions possible, why exactly is this happening?”
You could say that with this question Cowen is pushing for “simplicity on the other side of complexity.” (Holmes).
Someone who really knows something cold has mastered the details of it, then agglomerated them into chunks, then found an intelligible way to talk about the chunks and their relationships. When you know it cold, you can explain it to a five-year-old without too much loss of fidelity.
The “fewest dimensions possible” is the brilliant challenge of the question. The scarcity forces prioritization.
If you’re a founder of some kind - which really just means you’ve assigned yourself a problem to solve - I think it’s worth asking yourself Tyler’s question. In the fewest dimensions possible, what will solve this problem?
So many things matter to you and your problem. There are innumerable tangents to and from it. What’s worse, we’re trained in college - and grad school, if you do that - to find and explore those tangents, often to run very far along one. We’re rewarded for identifying complexity and often rewarded even more handsomely if we use complex language to do so.
Solving a problem outside the four corners of a term paper requires something different. You’ve got to identify what matters most, even if that thing is obvious and unsexy.
When I was in the early founding phase at a COVID testing and vaccination startup, we called this the “five boxes” exercise. There was so much uncertainty swirling around us and within us that we had to move forward by choosing, even if arbitrarily, some things to be clear about.
What at the simplest level, with the fewest components, was required to make a viable COVID testing system? We ended up with a list something like this:
Software for scheduling appointments and returning results to patients
Clinical staff to administer tests
Diagnostic lab to process tests
Clients to get tested
Sites where tests could be safely administered
Each item on the list was a box. When I was unsure what to do next, I looked for the boxes that were empty and ran at getting something into them.
This is one way you can build a minimum viable product. Instead of thinking about what features might be really novel and cool (which is admittedly more fun than the five boxes exercise), think about what features or backend must exist for a user problem to be solved.
This helped me immensely with deciding what was worth my time and what wasn’t, what I should outsource to other leaders and what I should run at headlong myself. Generous expert advisors helped us sort options within the boxes and, even more importantly, identify which boxes could be filled with almost anything.
Once you have your short list, you can then apply an 80/20 or Pareto principle analysis to it. In the best cases, there may be one item on the list that unlocks others. At the COVID startup, our first clients were public schools - these schools happened to have empty parking lots that we could use as testing locations. This was great for us and exceptionally convenient for the teachers and students at those schools. So recruiting schools and districts was getting us two birds with one crumb. Every hour invested there was at least twice as valuable as hours invested elsewhere, even on this Shortest List of Essential Stuff.
A few use cases where Cowen’s question might serve you well:
Choosing core values for your new team or company. Can you define the behavioral blueprint for achieving your mission in three values? Most companies have more. I’ve found that after 3, you’re either on to something that’s non-essential or you’re emphasizing something that’s super-important by having two values that basically target the same thing. (On a prior team I led, we had “speed” and “action” doing this double duty).
Alleviating a recurring pain point in the interactions between teams. The five boxes can help you drill down to what’s really going on in the messy space between people. It can be so tempting for a certain kind of empathetic leader to try to become an expert at mediating difficult situations between people. Often the better leader is one who structures the environment and the conversations in ways that preclude those difficult situations altogether. What is the smallest set of things that must be true for these two teams to amplify each other’s efforts instead of confound them?
