IT Automation | Apply first principle thinking

Planning IT automation seems to be very difficult. There is a lot of requirements and often times they are contrary to each other. We can easily get lost in planning all the details and everything that could go wrong. This article shows how we can step back and apply first principle thinking.

Proper analysis is important to do the right thing. A couple of years ago I worked in a small consulting company that was convinced that they were working Agile. Their defintion of being Agile was something like: “We are agile because we do not plan our work. We want to get results as quick as possible.” Even daily standups were frowned because of the costs that would be incurred by people “not working”. Not surprising that a lot of the projects went horribly wrong. For every failed project there was typcially one of the employees that was hold responsible for that. Everyone had their turn except the business owner who apparently never did anything wrong.

After I was being held responsible a couple of times I left this company and entered a completely different world. I started at a company that had a completely different definition of being agile. Planning what to do next in order not to miss out an opportunity was their holy grail. Probably more of 50% of the entire time of their employees was used up to do some sort of planning. Their focus was to not miss out an opportuniy. Not difficult to understand that this comapny did not progress either. Every sign of progress was stopped immediately by something like “we first have to go through the evaluation process and check if there is something better.”

Neither of those both companies were able to progress. So if 0% planning gets us the same result as doing 50% am I saying that the optimum is in between? Not really. I also know companies that use about 25% of their time for planning and there is not much progress either.

So how come that some companies revolutionize the world with building hyperloops, flying taxis or thermonuclear fusion reactors while others are busy with organizing their daily work.

Let’s see how successful people like Elon Musk handle it: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” So does he say that using up 90% of our time for planning is the optimum? Well, if we follow the dogma that “Time is money” we may come to that conclusion.

But what actually is important about that quote is not the amount of time he spends. What is important is that he puts his focus on understanding the problem and that means to apply first principle thinking. Most people pretent they know what they are doing and why they are doing it. But knowing is not enough, we have to understand it.

Elons definition of first principle thinking is “First principles is a physics way of looking at the world. You boil down things to the most fundamental truths and then reason up from there”

If you now think that you don’t have enough time or knowledge to apply that principle in your live I ask you to do the following quick test. Once you get to the evaluation of the test you will know whether you are qualified or not.

Think about why you think that way. Why do you think that you don’t have have enough time or knowledge to apply first principle thinking. Please do not cheat and stop reading here until you really have an answer.

If you took your time to get to an answer please read on. Here is a list of possible answers:

Even though your answer may be completely different you just proved to yourself that you have the ability and the desire to apply first principle thinking. It is inherent to every human being. It is just about asking the most simplest question over and over again: “WHY?”

Asking the WHY question is what we all did when we were children. But why is it that most of us stop asking that question once we grow older? Maybe someone told us that we should stop questioning everything. But why did we comply with that request? Maybe we were afraid of some consequences? Why is it that we were afraid of consequences…

Going back to what we did as children and asking the WHY question over and over and over again is what proper planning means. And that is not difficult at all.

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