Exploring a City

Suppose you’re on vacation in a new city. You’ve never been there before and you want to go to a coffee shop. Let’s also pretend for a minute that you don’t have access to google maps so you’re going to have to explore the city somehow if you want to find a coffee shop. You know that most cities have a lot of coffee shops, so you figure your best option is to start walking and see what you find.

So, you start walking east. You walk for a while and see no coffee shops. Following the “walk east” approach has taught you some things about the city. You’re a little less uncertain than you were when you started – but maybe in a way that doesn’t feel very useful. You know that the road east didn’t work out.

Suppose instead you had tried a “walk west” approach. What if you had found a coffee shop after walking just a couple minutes. Great! You’ve reduced your uncertainty on something that is obviously useful. You still don’t know what the other directions would teach you, but you’ve learned something that is directly applicable to your goal.

Given enough time, walking in a city, you’re bound to run into a coffee shop. But depending on the approach you take, you’ll learn different things along the way. If you only look for coffee shops, you might miss all the grocery stores with a coffee shop inside. Or you might not notice that the types of buildings around you could help you get there faster (lots of office buildings nearby? You probably won’t have to go much further). Or you might see all those but forget to look for an urgent care which is the next stop on your agenda.

Looking for all these different things takes extra effort. But along the way it also has a bigger effect on reducing your uncertainty. When you landed in the city you knew nothing about what was where. If you’re paying attention as you work towards your goal, you could figure things out that could help you reach it (or the next one) faster.

Most problem solving follows this pattern. Since in real-world situations we usually have heaps of uncertainty, there is a lot of opportunity to learn as you go. Do we want to do one thing that will work okay, or do we want to test if a different thing might work fantastically first? Do we build the whole project start to finish in one go, or do we take incremental steps and review along the way?

I’ll keep the post short this week. The crux of today’s idea is simple enough: Under uncertainty, how you do things matters since you will learn as a function of that “how.” Choose one method and you will learn wildly different things than another path. Knowing that whatever you are working on may fit into a bigger picture, you can be strategic about exactly which path you take and what uncertainty you set out to reduce.