Last week, I introduced the idea of the “Thinker Identity,” and I offered that a thinker develops five characteristic ways of thinking:

• Decisive
• Essentialized
• Principled
• Creative
• Value-Oriented

I chewed decisiveness quite thoroughly, and thought I had finished with essentialized, but after percolating on it, I realized I have more to say. So I’ll pick up there.

Essentialized (continued)

Last time I wrote that the purpose of essentialization is “to condense a complex body of information into a simple, retainable, ‘crow-friendly’ form that can then serve as a mental hook for retrieving or recreating the details.”

I neglected to make explicit why I consider essentialized thinking to be characteristic of the Thinker Identity. The short answer is: Essentializing is the basic way that you organize your knowledge. It is the mental action you take that then organizes your mental databanks for efficient recall.

The alternative (if you don’t do this mental work) is that information will be connected only in accordance with the vagaries of your experience. If you listen to a terrific speaker who presents everything in an essentialized form, simply listening actively will result in organized knowledge. You’ll remember the gist of the talk. But if you are distracted or the speaker’s material is disorganized, the default is that snippets will get connected in your memory based on association, emotional generalization, and serendipity. It will be difficult to retain or recall. Efficient learning requires essentialized thinking. 

It is not enough to grasp that something is true. To be able to retain that fact and apply your knowledge of it when appropriate requires organizing your mental databanks.

Another way to get better at essentializing

Last week I focused mostly on the communication benefits of essentializing and I explained the main way I became better at essentializing, which was through practicing logical skills.

However, I also mentioned that essentialized thinking is needed not just for communication, but for staying on track toward your goal. You need to be able to judge whether a feature of your product or a possible course of action for achieving your goal is essential to your success or a “nice to have.”

It didn’t occur to me until later that in my goal-setting classes, I teach a process called “planned evolution” that is another way to learn to essentialize.

I learned planned evolution as an engineer, years before I become interested in thinking skills. For technical people in the audience, it is the mental process used in identifying answers to questions like:

• What goes in the proof-of-concept experiment?
• What is the stripped-down prototype to make?
• What features should and should not be in the alpha version of the software?
• What needs to be working and tested first, as a foundation for building and testing the rest?
• What is the controlling specification — the spec that will shape the overall design?
• What’s the minimum viable product? (The whole “Lean” approach is a kind of “planned evolution.”)

For the non-technical people, the basic idea is that you focus on the big decisions and/or the basic functionality or the main technical problem first — that’s the essential — and then create some intermediate completion point by which you can judge your progress before you try to flesh out more details. You draw lessons from your intermediate result and iterate based on your conclusions. You might redo parts or you might add in another layer of detail to get to the next completed version.

Why you need an inductive process

This is an inductive process of essentialization, whereas the method I mentioned last week was a deductive process. Rather than trying to figure out everything in advance, you sort out one aspect at a time, in priority order. I often think of this as dealing with the biggest problem, getting that sorted, then work on the next biggest problem, and only work on the little stuff after you’re sure that you got the big stuff right.

You see this kind of inductive process in many other domains. A simple remedy I recommend when you are overloaded trying to make a decision is:

• List
• Group
• Choose

You start by listing everything on your mind just to get an overview, because the biggest problem you have is that you can’t think when overloaded. Listing guarantees you don’t have to hold all of those considerations in mind at once. Once they are on paper, you can refer back to them. So this reduces the load.

If the list is short, you may be able to make a decision as soon as you finish the list. But if you’re still overloaded, you need to reduce the load more — you need fewer items to choose between. That’s what the grouping stage does. You literally can’t make a decision until you get the number of options to be small enough that you can hold them in mind and judge them together.

You need an inductive process because the information is not yet organized in your mental databanks, even implicitly. Whenever you get stuck trying to answer the question, “What should I do?” you need an inductive process to figure it out.

A familiar form of planned evolution

This inductive process (planned evolution) is best known in writing. The well-known process which only some writers use is:

• Decide the theme
• Complete an outline
• Complete a draft
• Edit the complete draft for structure
• Edit the complete draft for clarity
• Edit the complete draft for impact

At the end of each iteration, you have a result that you could show to someone and communicate your message to some degree.

More importantly for the mental work, once you see the iteration complete, it is easier to judge the whole. When you see it as a whole, you might (and often do) get an insight that was not possible before about what is important or how to proceed. Then the next iteration will go off formula.

For example, sometimes you can write a short article as soon as you are clear on your theme. The opposite can happen, and did with this article. I thought the section on essentialized thinking was complete based on my earlier prep. It was only after seeing that “completed” version that these additional points occurred to me.

Learning from experience

Often when you see the intermediate version, you gain new knowledge. Indeed, planned evolution is often designed such that between iterations, you expect to get experimental results that will then be used to shape future iterations. You know that you don’t know everything, so you plan to make new observations.

Sometimes this results in serendipity. I know someone who coded a quick and dirty prototype of a module for a software project, just so they could test the other software modules, and then decided the prototype was good enough for the production version.

For this reason, “planned evolution” can be applied to any large, uncertain, risky, or complex project. It’s the top method I teach for reducing the risk of such projects and making them fit into limited time blocks.

It is mentally necessary because you cannot organize a large amount of disorganized information all at once. You need to organize in stages. The less organized the raw data, the more stages you need. Planned evolution is a means of harvesting and organizing information in a systematic way so that in each stage, you can retain and use the information.

The bottom line: Essentialized thinking is how you organize your knowledge for ease of application.

* * *

I’m still interested in any feedback you have. Next week we’ll move on to principles, which are the basic means of holding context.