Simple idea vs. Trivial idea


This reflection came from a discussion with my team about the value of brainstorming. Some think a lot of the time brainstorming can be a waste of time, since within the limited time, the discussion is usually very shallow and the ideas rather trivial. This discussion made me reflect on the subtle differences between "simple ideas" and "trivial ideas".

On paper, they both mean an idea that can be explained to people very easily, but to be more specific, trivial ideas refer to shallow ideas, things that seem obvious on the surface, but had not been thought through. They are often generated by over simplification of complex problems. For example, someone is having a high fever and asks for help, without any examination, if someone suggests that "why don't you take some Tylenol?" This is a trivial idea.

Trivial ideas are a subset of simple ideas, that means: all trivial ideas are simple ideas, but not all simple ideas are trivial ideas. Some simple ideas are generated from deep analysis and some genius inspiration, so in no way trivial. Amazon's 1-click purchase idea that had given them a 20 year competitive advantage since 1999 was a very good example. To simplify the denotation, we will refer to the simple but elegant, brilliant ideas as the "simple ideas" in this note.

Given the above definitions, it's very obvious that simple ideas are of very high value, and trivial ideas has almost no value, if not negative value. So we need to be extra careful when coming up with an idea or being told an idea. As I wrote previously, When you have an idea, always "Sleep on it". But sometimes there is also the urge that you want to share these ideas with someone and get their feedback, well, that can be useful to yourself, but might also have some cost: imagine you are new to a field, and as you learn, you start to come up with ideas, but they might be mostly amateur ideas without the deep understanding, and if you keep bouncing them off an expert, the best you can get is a lot of rejection, but the worst is that the expert gets annoyed since you are wasting their time.

There are a few thoughts that I reflected on, that can be used as an razor to check whether an idea is a trivial idea or a simple idea:


Simple ideas have exponential impact, while trivial ideas have at best linear impact

This is a razor that I use quite often, the thought process is basically: "If I do this, can I do 2x less work and achieve 10x more results". Simple ideas are always about doing less and achieving more, rather than doing more and achieving more. IKEA's "flat packaging & self assembly" idea is a good example here: the challenge that traditional furniture manufacturers face is the storage space as well as shipping. A trivial idea to address this for a big furniture manufacturer would be "build a large warehouse to store the product and build up more delivery capacity". This is a linear impact with linear increasing cost. What IKEA has done with "flat packaging & self assembly" is the opposite: they can use smaller warehouses to store more furniture, and they don't even need delivery any more since the customer can pick up and assemble on their own.

Simple ideas are found often at the intersection between domains, but one must at least be an expert in one domain

There are lots of good examples of the common sense knowledge or commoditized technology in one domain that creates groundbreaking impact in another domain. The recent application of Transformer models (which originally was from the domain of NLP) to computer vision (e.g. DETR, ViT) and achieves state of the art result is a good example. And Dr. Atul Gawande brought the exercise of a checklist which is very common in aerospace domain to the public health domain, helping WHO to develop the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist that saved millions of lives is another example. The key thing is that people who came up with these cross-domain ideas have deep knowledge of either the source domain (knowing deeply how a solution works) or of the target domain (knowing what specific problem needs a solution), or both. If you are a deep expert of neither domain, most likely the cross-domain idea that you come up with is a trivial idea.

Simple ideas can be put into deductive reasoning, trivial ideas can't

This is a small technique that you can use to do a quick test of whether your own idea or an idea given by someone else is a simple one or a trivial one. A simple idea put into deductive reasoning in a sentence would be something like: 

"Based on my analysis/experience/observation/derivation, we should do XYZ, by doing this, we should first see the outcome A, and this will lead to the bigger impact of B".

This sentence captures: 

  1. where this idea comes from
  2. what is the causality between action XYZ and the immediate outcome A
  3. the projected bigger impact of B. 
If you have the idea, try to put the idea into this format, if you can, great! If not, try to think through and see whether you can come to this point. If the idea comes from others, you can also ask them to answer questions with respect to 1), 2) and 3) and if they can't get you the answer, very likely the idea that you are hearing is a trivial one from their gut feeling, that hasn't been thought through yet.

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