First Principles

I was reading the other day about how Elon Musk “reasons from first principles“. And I was thinking, “Well, d’oh! Doesn’t everyone do that? I know I do.” And then, upon reflection, I thought, “Hmm, maybe most folks don’t do that.” I certainly have seen little evidence of it, compare to the evidence of folks reasoning by extension, and analogy. And failing to reason at all.

Now, allowing for journalistic hyperbole and the cult of the celebrity, there may just still be something in it.

So, in case you were wondering, and to remind myself, here’s some first principles underpinning the various things in my own portfolio of ideas and experiences:

The Antimatter Principle

The Antimatter Principle emerges from the following basic principles about us as people:

• All our actions and behaviours are simply consequent on trying to get our needs met.
• We are social animals and are driven to see other folks’ needs met, often even before our own.
• We humans have an innate sense of fairness which influences our every decision and action.

Flowchain

Flowchain emerges from the following basic principles concerning work and business:

• All commercial organisations – excepting, maybe, those busy milking their cash cows – are in the business of continually bringing new products, or at least new product features and upgrades, to market.
• When Cost of Delay is non-trivial, the speed of bringing new products and feature to market is significant.
• Flow (of value – not the Mihaly Csikszentmihaly kind of flow, here) offers the most likely means to minimise concept-to-cash time.
• Autonomy, mastery and shared purpose affords a means for people to find the intrinsic motivation to improve things (like flow).
• Building improvement into the way the work works increases the likelihood of having sufficient resources available to see improvement happen.

Prod•gnosis

Prod•gnosis emerges from the following basic principles concerning business operations:

• All commercial organisations – excepting, maybe, those busy milking their cash cows – are in the business of continually bringing new products, or at least new product features and upgrades, to market.
• Most new products are cobbled together via disjointed efforts crossing multiple organisational (silo) boundaries, and consequently incurring avoidable waste, rework, confusion and delays.
• The people with domain expertise in a particular product or service area are rarely, if ever, experts in building the operational value streams necessary to develop, sell and support those products and services.  

Emotioneering

Emotioneering emerges from the following basic principles concerning products and product development:

• People buy things based on how they feel (their emotional responses to the things they’re considering buying). See: Buy•ology by Martin Lindstrøm.
• Product uptake (revenues, margins, etc.) can be improved by deliberately designing and building products for maximum positive emotional responses.
• Quantification serves to explicitly identify and clarify the emotional responses we wish to see our products and service evoke (Cf. “Competitive Engineeering” ~ Gilb).

Rightshifting

Rightshifting emerges from the following basic principles concerning work in organisations:

• The effectiveness of an organisation is a direct function of its collective assumptions and beliefs.
• Effectiveness is a general attribute, spanning all aspects of an organisation’s operations (i.e. not just applicable to product development).

The Marshall Model

The Marshall Model emerges from the following basic principles concerning work in organisations:

• Different organisations demonstrable hold widely differing shared assumptions and beliefs about the world of work and how work should work – one organisation from another.
• Understanding which collection of shared assumptions and beliefs is in play in a given organisation helps interventionists select the most effective form(s) of intervention. (Cf. The Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition).

Organisational Psychotherapy

Organisation psychotherapy emerges from the following basic principles concerning people and organisations:

• The effectiveness (performance, productivity, revenues, profitability, success, etc.) of any organisation is a direct function of its collective assumptions and beliefs about the world of work and how work should work.
• Organisations fall short of the ideal in being (un)able to shift their collective assumptions and beliefs to better align with their objectives (both explicit and implicit).
• Having support available – either by engaging organisational therapists, or via facilitated self-help – increases the likelihood of an organisation engaging in the surfacing, reflecting upon, and ultimately changing its collective assumptions and beliefs.

– Bob