Expand Your Philosophy: Iteration Does Not Guarantee Better

Learned Wisdom
Written By Chris Read

Short principles for long-term clarity—and occasional epiphanies.

How do assumptions shape innovation, and when should we rebuild from first principles to regenerate mastery in problem-solving?

“Every subsequent iteration adjusts your current position based on your own understanding and the assumptions you started with – so smash it with a hammer and start anew.”

This might seem to fly slightly in the face of conventional wisdom, and you know what, good. The current zeitgeist will tell you to fail early in any endeavour so that you can move quickly into improving what you have. Although this is mostly correct, I want to provide an important caveat. Refining a turd means you may still have a turd at the core and, importantly, it may never amount to gold. Although a crass idiom, I am not intentionally being antithetical. I hope to help budge the underlying assumption that “root ideas are always ideas that will turn into good ones” and that “working on a thing and changing the design or nature of that thing actually makes it better in some way”.

Sometimes re-starting, rebuilding, and re-engineering solutions from first principles with your new level of skill and experience is the only way to figure out if you have the proverbial “turd” or if something else would be better suited. Iterative models always assume that the core idea is solid enough to build on top of or even be the starting point, but this is not necessarily true. The focus here is on the solution and what assumptions it is predicated on. If you make bad assumptions and build a bunch of stuff on top of those bad assumptions, there are serious limitations that you introduce into design. That being said, you cannot always kill all ambiguity, however, people use this as an excuse to not consider the assumptions they have made within their process and that is a little flawed. We assume that the way in which we have designed our solution is correct. But, although tiring, starting again and re-anchoring on a new, best approximated start point based on current experience can drastically change your design, understanding and capabilities as you move forward making for faster progress. To make assumptions with awareness is foresight and preparedness – to ignore them or to assume you know better is ignorance.

Here is the rub, if you are only focusing on the thing in front of you, it can only be as good as the maximum usefulness or utility that a thing inherently has. For example, if you consider a drill or tool of some kind, you can only be as good at drilling as the tool will allow – for example it cannot drill at 90 degrees to the press angle, physics and its design won’t allow it. You have a few options (1) Get really good at using the drill [Master] – thereby mitigating some of the limitations (2) Design bits and pieces to augment the current drill [Design] – thereby subverting some of the limitations (3) Build a better drill from base principles up [Regeneration] – re-designs with awareness of previous limitations and make adjustments to a totally new blueprint in the form of a drill or not.

Do not get me wrong, all of these options are useful, and many people would consider (1) and (2), which is a great start. However, I believe that we often totally omit option 3 as it is time and effort intensive. Although it is not always applicable and may be seen as “re-inventing the wheel”, it is a great thought exercise to consider what ways we would/wouldn’t change something if we had to build it from scratch and not in the image of the current solution.

Paradigm breaking ideas come from innovators and inventors who re-start, re-imagine, and re-design the world around them rather than accepting things handed to them, underlying assumptions and all. So, every time you iterate, ask how you will make it better by being better [Master], creating better things [Design], or smashing it to the ground and starting again [Regeneration]. If you overcome the delusions and assumptions that you hold, you may find yourself uncovering something fantastically new.

 

Reflection Questions:

  • In what ways could I better master the skill of using this?

  • In what ways can I adapt or design things to make this thing more effective?

  • What would you do to improve this thing if you had to start the core from scratch? What have you learned from all past experiences and how best could you use your skill and understanding to reimagine this?  

Songs That Embody This For Me:

Resources You Could Explore:

Other Creations:

 

Chris Read
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