Hi guys and welcome back to Brain-Friendly Thinking!
The clearer a topic in our mind the easier it is for us to point out the essentials.
But the reverse is also true.
The more we understand the essentials, the clearer a topic becomes.
And creating hierarchies is a great tool to explore the essentials.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was in a difficult position.
The sales had grown too low to support the very wide product portfolio Apple had at that
time.
So the first order of business for Steve Jobs was to cut costs and save money.
A lot of managers in that situation have a knack for saving money at the wrong spot.
And so over time the situation of the company becomes worse and worse.
But Steve Jobs knew, not only did he have to save money, but he had to save money in
such a way that the long-term success of Apple was not only not compromised, but even strengthened.
He did this by looking at the Apple products and at the market.
And then he decided to radically simplify the product portfolio.
You could sell a computer to a home user and a business user.
And you could sell them a desktop or a laptop.
Two criteria, four products.
That was all Apple focussed on for a couple of years.
Because they only focussed on four projects, they could reaaly make sure that those projects
delivered what the customer wanted.
This situation is absolutely obvious in hindsight, but if you are in the middle of things and
problems are popping up left and right, and everybody screams at you that their project
is the mopst important one, it is far fromn easy to make the right decisions when cutting
back.
In order to do this, you need a clear understanding of what is the most important thing.
And then relentlessly focus on that.
And focus means, anything that does not belong into your focus, you have to actively push
aside.
For now.
By doing this, if you focus on the right things, the right things become stronger and stronger.
I you focus on the wrong things, not only does it not help you right now, but you also
push away other opportunities which might have helped you.
To pull this off successfully, you must really understand what is going on.
You need a deep knowledge about the field you’re operating in.
Something similar was reported from Disney.
When the Sherman brothers worked on the score for Mary Poppins in the early 1960s, there
was no doubt in their mind that hey had to start with one particular song.
“Tupence a piece”, the bird lady song.
Why?
Well, this song is not about birds, as you might think.
It is all about kindness.
And they understood that that was the central theme of the movie.
So they started from that song and afterwards they worked on ll of the other songs.
And Walt listened to all of that and then he said at the end: “Play me that bird lady
song again!”
He listened to it again and said: “Yes, that’s what it’s all about.”
For any product, artwork or problem we’re trying to solve, there are certain essentials
which we absolutely must nail.
If you do, the other problems are not so bad anymore.
If you don’t, we just dig ourselves deeper until we’re running from disaster to disaster
while everything around us is start to fall apart.
So then, this means we need a way of identifying these essentials.
And this is where creating hierarchies come in.
You see in order to know what is the essential bit, we must be able to make judgements.
Judgements based on certain criteria, on certain values.
And he German psychologist Vera F. Birkenbihl noticed, that it’s exactly the same type
of decisions of judgements you need to make when you create your hierarchies.
If you want to know whether a certain item is above or below another one, you need to
make a judgement based on criteria.
Let’s make a simple example.
Here’s a list with three items: a piano, a piccolo flute and a violin.
Let’s take tones.
Well…
OK, already we have a problem.
What do we mean by tones?
Do I mean how many tones the instrument can play?
Or what is the range between the highest and the lowest note?
So, already we see: the criteria I chose is not precise enough to make the ranking.
But let’s say I’m actually interested in the absolute number of notes that can be
played.
No for the pi piano, it is comparatively easy to determine this.
In principle it is very easy to count the number of notes of the piano.
Even though…
I think a piano is two octaves, if I remember correctly.
I’m not sure how many notes these are exactly, but this is something I could easily look
up.
Now, a piccolo flute…
Well, a piccolo flute, it’s probably more complicated, you cannot simply count the number
of holes.
But it depends on which holes are open and which holes are closed.
But still, there is a comparatively small number of options available, so you can count
it.
What about the violin?
This is actually something I’m I’m not sure about.
Because you have the 5 strings of the violin and each string has a different length, so
it has basically a different tone.
But then you have the other part of the string which you clamp down with your fingers and
I think in principle, from the highest to the lowest note of the string, that the string
can produce, you should be able to vary it in as small increments as you like.
So, that means that, potentially, the number of notes you can play on the violin, not the
range of notes, but the number of notes, should be much larger than for the piano.
Having said this, I’m actually not sure that this is the case, because this is an
area where I have comparatively little knowledge about.
Ah, and now you see: as I’m trying to rank them, as I’m thinking about making the judgements
for the different instruments I identify gaps in my knowledge Which I can now go and I can
close.
And once I have done further research, using this new data, using this new information,
I can make better judgements.
And the more experience you have, the easier this exercise becomes, and also the higher
the chance that your final result will actually be correct.
But you see, as you think about making those judgements, the judgement itself is not so
important.
What is more important is that it acts as a focus.
It shows you very clearly what you know and what you don’t know.
And it helps you to bring different sources together and weigh one against the other.
And this is what it’s about.
This is why creating a hierarchy is so good to getting down to the essentials.
And then later on use the essentials in a different context.
Now, I selected a simple list, just so, that I could show you the principles.
You might not think that ranking instruments according to any specific criteria is very
thrilling.
What, however, if, instead of a list of instruments, we would have a list of Corona measures?
And we want to rank them according to their effectiveness.
Now suddenly it becomes much more interesting.
And it becomes also much more difficult.
Because now we have to take into account more criteria and we have to balance different
criterias against each other.
This is, of course, why it is so hard to decide on the appropriate measures.
So, we can take our Corona measures list and we can break it down.
We can say: Right, what are the ways in which the virus can spread.
Once we have those ways, which of them is the most likely to occur?
And for that we can capitalise on a wealth of data.
Data collected during the pandemic, but also data from scientific paper, experience with
other Corona viruses or other viruses in general which spread similarly to COVID-19.
We can make a second list and we can ask: What of these items, what of these measures,
has the highest financial impact?
And again we can think of it in two ways: shot-term or long-term.
To answer that question is much more difficult, because we need to predict the future and
that will always be inaccurate.
Just some predictions are better than others.
We could, for instance, do simulations.
And even within the simulations there’re different ways of doing the simulation.
And different ways of doing the simulation will give us different answers will which
will give us a different ranking.
Now what?
Now we could go and see what do these rankings have in common?
And how do they differ?
Are they really completely different?
It is actually much more likely that there are a couple of items that always appear at
the top of the list.
And others which are always appear at the bottom.
Not necessarily at exactly the same position, but if the same item again and again appears
within the five most costly ones, no matter what we use to predict the financial impact,
then it is actually very likely that this will be a costly impact for everybody.
Even though we’re just scratching the surface, we already see what an excellent thinking
tool creating hierarchies are.
Because they provide us with a structure, they help us to identify gaps in our knowledge
and understanding and they give us a way of structuring the information.
In order to improve your thinking even more, you can then go and talk to other people.
Either give them the same list of items you have and have them rank them as well.
Or already provide them with your ranking and say: What do you think about this?
But if you go and you use creating hierarchies as a focus you will also get much more focussed
responses.
And they in turn will help you more to understand the subject on a deeper level in a shorter
amount of time.
So, an important component is to start improving your clarity of thought before you need it.
Do this exercise even though you don’t have a specific problem at the moment which you
want to solve.
If you have a problem, yes, you can also use them.
But if you start even before, you prepare yourself.
And then when you come into a situation where you need that knowledge, you already have
it.
And you can very quickly take very good decisions.
Of course, we can’t prepare for everything that’s going to come.
But if you have a focus topic, and you really should have a focus topic, if you have a focus
topic, this is where you can start.
And the more you play with your focus topic in this way, the better you will understand
it and the more of an expert you will become.
Why is it important to become an expert?
Well for that you can watch the video right here.
Or, if your problem is more hat you have ideas, but you can’t put them into words, you can
watch the video here.
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And until next time: keep thinking!