(2022-08-29) Chin Brief Notes On The Idea Maze

Cedric Chin: Brief Notes on the Idea Maze. In this piece, I want to talk a little about what’s leapt out to me while I wrote and researched these cases. (2022-08-23-ChinTheIdeaMazeCases)

The Idea Maze is Fundamentally About Uncertainty

Most of these cases are about people building radically successful new products, which they had no hope of imagining before they started building. The analogy of the maze is one way of thinking about this experience — but another, equally powerful way might be ‘feeling one’s way through a thick fog.’

Apple had to have some idea of the iPhone’s final form, but that so many of the details were still unknown to them that all they had available to evaluate these details were ‘squishy’ questions.

the only way Apple would figure out the rest of the details of the iPhone was through iteration … and the unit of iteration that Apple worked at was the demo.

you can only really see a few decisions ahead of you.

One way of reading this is to say that “feeling totally unsure about your decisions is the norm”.

Conviction Without (Strong) Evidence

occasional need to develop conviction when faced with little to no evidence.

I’ll suggest that “you should expect to make some decisions on the basis of little-to-no evidence when navigating the Idea Maze, and this is what that looks like.”

A slightly more opinionated take is that developing ‘conviction in the face of great risk and/or uncertainty’ demands a healthy respect for that uncertainty

Amazon’s leadership knew any changes would take a few years to show up in the data, since people only shopped on Amazon a few times a year in 2004.

Good Ideas Can Be Random, and are Often Fragile

conclusion might be “… and therefore you shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss ideas when you’re deep in the Idea Maze.”

Some instantiations of the Idea Maze demand a large number of things to go right. My goto example for this is Instagram. (Is this an example of super intelligent navigation, or luck?)

It would be disingenuous to say that luck didn’t have something to do with Instagram’s success. (Also note they got bought before they had revenue.)

But one other conclusion you may draw is that only some forms of the Idea Maze are difficult in this ‘multiple things right’ sort of way; others are difficult in very different ways. (cf Rule of Three)

With Microsoft Office (MsOffice), for instance, the bulk of the difficulty was in the org design necessary to pursue the suite strategy (after the DAD developed conviction in said strategy). (Maybe a bad case for this topic?)

Wrapping Up

You’ll notice that my conclusions here are all very conservative.

One of the nice things about collecting multiple concept instantiations is that you very quickly disabuse yourself of certain common-sensical but ultimately misguided beliefs. For instance, before I started on this series, I thought that world-dominating products grew quickly

I also thought that it was always good practice to iterate in a ‘disciplined’ manner — which I believed meant clear statements of hypotheses at each turn of the Idea Maze. But it’s not so clear that this is required in every case