The world is after disruption! Its a paradox that many are striving for disruption but at the same time there’s a common belief about all the ideas are already taken. However, the world continues to move on, with incremental innovation and also at times ground breaking disruption.
How are the original thinkers able to come up with a new dimension while many a bunch seems to have exhausted all the options? The answer is first principles thinking. Knowingly or unknowingly these disruptors break down a problem/function into granular components, question all traditional assumptions, not take no for an answer and arrive at the core fundamentals. They then experiment by building things ground up which at times sets them on an entirely different trajectory and make true innovation happen!
The origins of this approach dates back to Aristotle who defines it as – ‘the first basis from which a thing is known’. Descartes, the philosopher used Cartesian product (now called so) to systematically doubt everything until he was left with only facts. This approach is embraced by modern day influencers like Elon Musk who graciously applied it in his ventures viz. Tesla and SpaceX. At Tesla he went to the bottom of the reasoning for key challenges by first principles and cracked them by focusing on batteries to disrupt this industry. At SpaceX in order to reduce the astronomical prices of rockets and to build re-usable rockets, he broke down the challenge, arrived at fundamentals and achieved 10x savings in building rockets.
My experience:
I’ve seen many leaders at work or in professional network, quoting first principles quite often these days. Also, the five whys post mortem format used at Amazon, referred as correction of errors is also a variant of first principles questioning. Children have this approach (perceived as annoying) to continuously question everything they come across, they hear as the answer. Unfortunately With time, they get schooled to adapt reasoning by analogy than by first principles. With the intense questioning of a problem, we are bound to arrive at the actual root cause and relevant actions to solve it permanently.
Its true that most of the perceived innovation that we see today is about form and not the function. These are incremental changes to what already exists. Disruption happens when there’s innovation on the function.
First principles thinking can be applied anywhere. All it requires is a mindset on questioning everything and scouting for convincing answers. The most expensive mistakes that I’ve seen personally in the teams I worked boil down to incorrect assumptions. While making assumptions helps us to move fast, its very important to validate them at the earliest. With first principles thinking, if enough room is provided to arrive at the core, there would be less assumptions or objective assumptions which help to avoid/reduce mistakes.
Conclusion:
Everyone wants out of the box thinking but most of the folks rely on reasoning by analogy and stay in the box. People look for references for inspiration/adaptation and thus most of the incremental improvements we see are because of this approach. Its a quick way of producing results. However for building anything substantial, first principles thinking is a better approach. As its physics way of looking at things, it takes time and also requires more mental reasoning. That’s the trade-off.