The Power Of Inversion Thinking

The great Charlie Munger, Warren Buffets business partner at Berkshire Hathaway shared a great insight recently which I thought I’d pass on my interpretation.

In business, exercising rational decision making is one of the greatest determinants to success.

Yet as humans we are constantly carrying around this evolutionary baggage that gets in the way of our rational thinking.

Emotions, exhaustion, hormones etc.

Which is why if we can apply certain tools and behaviours that allow us to remove our biological biases to facilitate our rational thinking, we should. Especially in business.

Inversion thinking is simple.

You are presented a problem that you must solve to the best of your ability.

The logical next step would be to begin devising the most effective and efficient actions that would solve the problem.

Inversion thinking… by definition inverts the approach and instead, you think about the best ways that would make the problem worse the quickest and the easiest.

Once you identify what these things are, you focus your actions on avoiding these things at all costs.

Charlie gave a great example of when he was a meteorologist in WWII.

His job was to predict the weather so that pilots wouldn’t fly in dangerous conditions and crash.

He just reversed the problem...

Suppose he wanted to kill a lot of pilots, what would be the best way to do that?

He soon figured out that the easiest way to do this was to get the planes into icing that they couldn’t handle or get the pilot to a place where they’d run out of fuel before they could safely land.

And so he spent most of his time avoiding those two things.

You may say that inverting the problem ends up just being the same thing in reverse.

However, it benefits you more frequently inverting problems as it forces to you to get better at avoiding the things that are the only real threats to your business, job, project… you name it.

Most problems take a complete understanding to solve them. How does it look from the top down vs the bottom looking up?

You can solve a problem better if you know what will make the problem worse the easiest.

For agency owners this may look something like this:

Goal = I want to grow my marketing agency to $15k per month profit.

Invert = How could I put myself out of business for good?

Answer = Deliver a horrible service and don’t fill the pipeline with potential new business.

Outcome = Focus most of your energy on offering the best service out there and build a consistent sales system that you can automate.