Undervaluing the true state of the case
No Comments »This is a post I wrote some time back, inspired by Scott Berkun in turn inspired by Ada Lovelace. I’m still today baffled by the perception we have of the complexity of problems and various technology implementations. It seems the Linchpins have some innate ability to breakdown things that are immeasurably complex into finite pieces that at their base just make sense. It’s almost like an “a-ha” moment, where someone on the team is able to explain something in such terms that everyone is immediately comforted by the newfound simplicity of what might have been a simply monstrous undertaking.
By way of Scott Berkun:
It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case, when we do discover that our notions have surpassed those that were really tenable.
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.
This assessment is amazing and just as apt for today as when Ada Lovelace penned it. It’s the scientific view of what makes entpreneurialism work – the reason we ever have any new ideas is that we avoid the overrate/undervalue trap: seeing the “case” not as a pie that is slowly running out of slices, but as something that has the ability to make new pies.
With the huge mass of technology solutions available today, some may think that the world would run out of problems, something like:
As technology solutions approach infinite, problems approach zero.
In reality, it seems that for every technology, there are just as many (or more) problems, maybe problems are the result of some function of technology solutions available:
Problems = f (Solutions)
I often further wonder if we’ve missed the real fundamental here, some game-changing foundational solution, that for the sake of money or love, we’ve bypassed excitedly on our way to our first round of VC money or some IPO – the solution of which might have dramatically changed the basis for the function of itself.
Yeah, that means things like Craigslist and Twitter. There weren’t herds of technologists and scientists in a basement thinking up some advanced undertaking. A couple folks made something to solve a problem they had, and voila. A foundation-changing solution.
Are you building a foundation-changing solution? How is what you’re doing changing the function of solutions to problems? This is something you should know.