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#Laws of Simplicity

This is from a June 07, 2005 post on my original Simplicity blog that a reader found still exists on the Wayback Machine here .

Brand is an inoperable asset for the customer. It doesn t make your product work any better. Although it does makes a potential consumer desire your product more.

Is it cheaper to improve a product s reliability and functionality? Or is it cheaper to improve a product s desirability? Considering the marginal costs of additional research and development, combined with production, testing, assurance, and so forth, the answer is fairly clear. Investing in advertising is a cost-effective way to increase the profit for an existing product. If the campaign is any good of course.

What determines good ? Is it the copy? Is it the visuals? Is it the celebrity that has been chosen to be the head cheerleader? Seems like there are tons of subjective variables to consider that will ultimately define success or failure.

On second thought, maybe it is cheaper to make the product better. But nobody would know if it were any better without proper advertising.

Perhaps the one sure thing is to realize product improvements combined with a relevant degree of marketing. In essence, the proverbial do both.

Do both. has been a recurring theme in my life just as much as Nike s Just Do it. Do I do X or Y? Both are extremely hard tasks. You would think that a good mentor would steer you in an efficient manner by telling you which to attack first. Turns out that all of my mentors (at least the ones I would respect) would damn me with the simple recommendation to Do both. Sure does solve a lot of problems. Kind of kills your personal life though

I was pleased and honored to see this adaptation by Dr. Daniel Cabrera  at Mayo Clinic on applying the Laws of Simplicity to the emergency medicine space. The link is here: http://mayocl.in/1rI8GuA  Thank you Dr. Cabrera! -JM

• Reduce. The easiest way to approach a clinical problem is to reduce it to its minimal meaningful expression.
• Organize. Grouping problems and information make infinite problems appears finite.
• Time. Decrease time spent in meaningless activities and increasing time on essential tasks.
• Learn. Knowledge is key, you need to know where to find the answer to any question.
• Differences.  The key is to find what makes a clinical problem different from others and not how to make it fit into a pattern.
• Context. The environment provides meaning to the problem; not the other way around.
• Emotion. Use your intuition (quasirrational decision making) and avoid your emotional and cognitive biases.
• Trust. Less information is better than more information. Subtract the meaningless and add the meaningful.
• Failure.  Use metacognition to learn where the system failed. Learn from your and others mistakes.
• The-One. Clinical problems are more complex than they look but simpler than you think. 

Way, way back I separated the Laws of Simplicity into two categories: aesthetic thinking vs logical  thinking. The idea was too complex for me to wrestle with at the time, but now I m pulling the thoughts out of cryosleep. Click on the image above, or here s the Slideshare link. -JM