Narrowing the scope — The journey of an idea (Part 2)
(Part 1) available here
Many unknowns exist in the world of the new. Ryan Singer illustrates these challenges in the ‘Hill chart’ above. In part 1 I started to explore the hypothesis that critical thinking could help empower people to make better decisions. In this post, I talk about my struggle to identify a viable business opportunity.
At a high level, the steps up this hill have involved:
- Exploring problem statements
- Speaking with experts
- Consistently evaluating new ideas
- Making plans for what’s next
My journey through these four steps has led me one step closer to identifying a potential audience to test my hypothesis on. Grasping these learnings I have refined the vision statement to be:
To make the world more effective at solving problems
Finding the right problems to solve
There are many problems in the world that can be tackled but if you want to build something that can grow into a sustainable business you have to be conscious of the types of problems you aim to solve. Des Traynor’s post on ‘Not all good products make good businesses’ became a form of a checklist that I referred to often throughout this process. As illustrated below, investors of potential startups are often assessing if a business can attain all three sides.
It is tempting to dive into new ideas, especially when they are about something that you are passionate about; however, taking the time to validate these assumptions with real data can save you from things such as your own cognitive bias.
In the diagram below, we can see the various types of cognitive bias that you can hold at any given time.
To identify what data would help with my validations I decided to speak with people who were actively involved in building tools that help people make better decisions.
“It’s okay not to know all the answers. It’s better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything, closes the door to finding out what’s really there.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson
Dr Stefan Schubert, a researcher at the Social Behaviour and Ethics Lab at Oxford University very kindly gave up his time to discuss his work and experience in this field. Dr Stefan Schubert has a multidisciplinary background, with a PhD in philosophy and an MA in political science. Prior to joining Centre of Effective Altruism, he did a postdoc at London School of Economics, where he combined his research with outreach work in the field of political rationality. He set up the Swedish Network for Evidence-Based Policy and has developed tools alongside clearerthinking.org including argument-checking of opinion pieces and political debates.
At the beginning of our discussion, I outlined that my motivations for speaking with him were to understand his background and experience building frameworks for decision making.
The TLDR of what I learned from our discussion was that a framework built for critical thinking is not something that can easily be transferred across domains. Building effective tools that enable critical thinking tend to require a deep domain knowledge and as such become hard to replicate or scale.
High Touch vs Low Touch Solutions
Referencing Des Traynor’s quadrant for determining a viable product, we discussed two ideas
- Critical thinking through dialogue (High Touch)
- Critical thinking through a standardized framework (Low Touch)
If critical thinking, like philosophical ideas, is most effectively understood through dialogue then it raises the question of if a low touch model can exist. Building an effective cross discipline framework can be extremely difficult as its inputs have to meet very specific conditions. Another example that I had come across before this discussion was a flowchart developed by three researchers from the University of Queensland. Although useful, you can see how referencing an argument checking flowchart mid-discussion won’t always be practical or viable.
Being informed of the challenges that Stefan had faced really changed my perception on how to approach the problem. It brought me further up the Hill Chart and helped me to understand the difficulties I may face when trying to a bring a viable solution to market. In my first post I talked about how I originally wanted to focus on helping children to critically think; however, with very little experience in educating children I decided to focus my efforts on an area more familiar. The area I felt most familiar with was Product Management and Entrepreneurship. Taking all of these points into account it made more sense for the vision to evolve past enabling critical thought and to focus on how I can help the world become more effective at solving problems.
Finding a big and frequent problem
Reading Marc Andreessen’s 2011 article on ‘Why Software is Eating the World’ , we are reminded why companies like Slack, Atlasssian, Trello etc. now exist. The thing that all software companies have in common is that they are all trying to solve a problem for someone. Understanding problem statements, making informed decisions and solving said problems successfully is a frequent and big problem for Entrepreneurs and Product Managers.
My next step is to speak with people in these positions, listen to the processes they follow and the pain points that they experience. Based on these interviews I hope to identify a common pain point, assess any corresponding data available to support its validity and then begin the process of trying to create something of value for them.
References and useful reading
Are you solving the right problems?
Evaluating an argument with just one flow chart
Why Software is eating the world
‘Not all good products make good businesses’
New in Basecamp: See where projects really stand with the Hill Chart
