Clean thinking means not fooling yourself
Maarten Dalmijn
Author of 'Driving Value with Sprint Goals' | Helping teams to beat the Feature Factory | Speaking, Training and Consulting all over the world @ dalmyn.com
Steve Jobs has famously said:
“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
Many people might interpret this as that clear thinking is what matters most. By thinking long and hard, we can get our thinking clean. You'd be wrong.
Clear thinking isn't good enough.
Aristotle is one of the greatest minds and clearest thinkers who ever lived. Despite his brilliance, he believed that women had fewer teeth than men.
This mistaken belief was only possible because he never bothered to count the teeth of males and females. Men and women actually have the same number of teeth.
To get your thinking clean, just thinking won't cut it.
Clean thinking means polishing your ideas by exposing them to reality.
领英推荐
Clean thinking means messy thinking. Being aware that your clean thinking is messy and devising experiments to remove the mess from your thinking. It means balancing thinking, doing, and reflecting on what you're doing.
Clean thinking is difficult because we are great at fooling ourselves.
In the words of Nobel prize winner Richard Feynman:
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”
A lot of complexity happens because we are fooling ourselves the complexity adds value. We mistakenly believe everything we add matters. We fall in love with our ideas and don't bother to check if that love is returned in the real world.
The hard work in clean thinking isn't the thinking. What makes it hard is we have to prevent fooling ourselves.
Simplicity happens when we figure out a way to not fool ourselves and embrace the mess.
Simplicity results from polishing off the mess off our ideas by exposing them to reality.
Certified Agile Coach (ICP-ACC, CSM, Flow@Scale Pioneer ), Works with people and teams to transform ideas into valuable products and services.
3 年"Exposing your thinking" with something like https://flyinglogic.com/ Makes it easier to share and update as you get contributions from others.
Seeker of better questions
3 年If you look at the difference between v1 and v2 of the SpaceX Raptor engine. And in the Tesla Model Y production process in Austin, they've removed several hundred parts and 600 robots from the production process. Their quest for simplification is essentially relentless...
MD StrategyAudit. Business coach, Strategy and Business development, Brand development, Speaker.
3 年Steve jobs is reported to have said 'Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication' and I would agree.
Coaching Agility | Rehumanizing Workflow
3 年We all bring our own inclinations/presumptions/baggage to the conversations we have, the products we design & build. And we often misconstrue those thoughts to be from the customer. I wonder what we could learn from Clean Language to help us achieve the simplest product that will bring the most value. https://cleanlearning.co.uk/blog/discuss/clean-language-questions
Author | Educator | Principal Consultant | Enterprise Architect | Program/Project Manager | Business Architect
3 年Both Twain, Blaise Pascal, John Locke and others were reputed to have said, “I didn't?have time?to write you a?short?letter,?so?I wrote you a?long?one.” or something along the same lines. We fall in love with our own ideas and all too often build stuff that never deserved to be built and not hangs like an albatross around our necks. Perhaps narrowing the features to be built in a PI or a sprint and honing them before moving on is a better approach than shotgunning it.