Simplify Complexity

I’ve been a guest on several podcasts recently, and during one of them the host asked me to describe the process I use for taking a complex situation and finding the few key variables that actually matter for a decision.  Here is what I said.

First, I’m a fan of a famous quote alleged to have been said by Albert Einstein:

Everything should be made as simple as possible. But no simpler.

When dealing with innovation, it is easy to become paralyzed worrying about all the possible things that could go wrong. If you try to deal with every one of those concerns up front, you will end up frozen in place dealing with complexity. An approach I have used to simplify things is to have the team of innovators create a list of all the questions they can think of that could be concerns for the project.  Then score each concern in two categories. First, how likely is it that the concern will happen?  Second, if it does happen, how serious will it be? Score every concern from 1-10 in each category, with 1 being unimportant and 10 being disastrous. Be rigorous about how you set those scores. Everything can’t be a 10. One way to deal with that problem is to compare just two concerns at a time. “Is Concern A more or less likely to occur than Concern B? Which of the two would be more serious if it did happen?”  By forcing one to be scored higher than the other you reduce the risk of everything being scored identically. You still might have a problem if one concern is scored higher in one category and lower in the other, but we will deal with that in a moment.

Once you have set the scores for the individual categories, multiply the two scores together to get a combined number. Ideally, this will result in a rank-ordered list of priorities. In situations where there are multiple concerns with the same combined score, use the approach described above to compare only two concerns at a time. Force one concern to be ranked higher than the other. Do this for all combinations of two concerns that would otherwise end up tied.

By being rigorous with this process, you will end up with a priority list of concerns from most to least serious. Focus on answering the three or four most serious concerns first. They might be things like whether there is really a market for your idea or whether the necessary technology has been invented. Don’t waste time worrying about lesser concerns before you even know whether you have a viable innovation.

By simplifying your decision-making process, you can avoid wasting time pursuing innovations that have little chance of success, or agonizing over a lengthy list of concerns that delay you from moving ahead with a promising idea.