One thing I’ve started to notice from all of these “Idea Maze” posts is that many ideas start from a thesis of how the world works:
- ByteDance - the core thesis was that mobile internet would fragment user time into shorter chunks, making in-depth/long-form content inconvenient to consume and increasing the prevalence of light-hearted/short-form content. Despite numerous setbacks, Bytedance stuck to this core thesis
- Apple’s iPhone Keyboard - the core thesis was that a dynamic app interface was preferable over a static one (ie. using a physical keyboard) because it allowed for a broader range of apps to offer high usability and native performance on the device. As a result, the virtual keyboard was a non-negotiable, core feature for the iPhone that needed to be perfected. Despite numerous setbacks, the team never contemplated switching to a physical keyboard due to this core thesis.
- Amazon - Bezos’s core thesis was that greater convenience and satisfaction for customers would drive sales growth. His core approach to addressing this thesis, in the case of Prime, was to dramatically improve the shipping experience, bringing convenience closer inline with the in-store shopping experience. He stuck to this thesis despite 2 years of negative results for Prime Shipping.
In all 3 cases, the core thing I’ve noticed is that the thesis is a non-rational idea. It does not typically rely on data, but instead on the expert intuition of the founder. Data and rational decision-making is used to help guide the company through the Idea Maze, but the maze itself is defined by the broader thesis. That is, all rational thought is in service of this larger, intuitive view of where the world is heading.
Given this observation, my question is this - how should one go about learning to arrive at better theses of how the world works? My first instinct is to resort to analogical reasoning, much as we’re doing in this case library - read histories of industries similar to your own, as well as histories and biographies of companies and individuals that operate within these industries. These case studies should serve to help intuitively identify trends as they arise.
However, this brings up another question - if the thought process to generate these theses is generally intuitive and we claim that this intuition can be improved through analogical reasoning, how do we evaluate whether or not we are actually improving? The theses tend to unfold over a timescale of years, so the feedback loop is much too delayed to actually evaluate your performance and iterate on your approach.
Perhaps the solution is to read histories of trends that you are unfamilair with and guess how things will unfold before you reach the end of the book or case study, evaluating how you did in your assessment and analyzing where you went wrong. If analogical reasoning really does work well here, then as you accumulate more case studies in your head, you should get more and more of these “unseen” trends correct during your study.