Cobra Effect · Decisions and strategy
Inversion
To find the path to success, first ask what would guarantee failure.
6 cards, read aloud in 2:38, with a test and sources.
A nineteenth century mathematician has a rule for hard problems. Turn them round.
Carl Jacobi, so the story goes, told his students to invert, always invert. Man muss immer umkehren. When a problem will not yield from the front, state it backwards and attack from there. The attribution is secondhand, but the method has outlived the question of who said it.
Charlie Munger made it a way of life.
Warren Buffett’s partner quoted Jacobi for decades. All I want to know is where I’m going to die, he said, so I’ll never go there. In 1986 he gave a school commencement speech and refused to tell the students how to succeed. Instead he gave them a guaranteed recipe for misery.
His recipe. Be unreliable. Learn only from your own mistakes. Quit at the first setback.
Munger’s list is easy to turn back over. Be reliable. Learn from other people’s mistakes as well as your own. Keep going after the first failure. The odd thing is that the backwards list is more useful. Nobody knows what makes a life go well. Everybody knows what wrecks one.
That is inversion.
Instead of asking how to reach a goal, ask what would guarantee missing it. Then avoid that. The forward question is hard because success has a thousand ingredients and you don’t know which ones matter. The backward question is easy because failure usually has a few, and they are obvious once named.
Engineers and doctors do this all day.
A bridge designer asks what would make it fall, and builds against that. Gary Klein taught teams to hold a premortem in 2007. Imagine the project has failed. Now write the story of why. People who are shy of criticising a plan will happily explain a disaster. The failures they name are the ones the plan then avoids.
Try it on whatever you are planning this week.
Write down the goal. Underneath, write how you would make certain of failing. Miss the deadline? Don’t start. Lose the customer? Ignore the calls. Ruin the trip? Don’t book anything. Cross each one out. What is left is a plan, and it took five minutes.
Sources
- Charlie Munger, Wikipedia. The 1986 speech is called Prescriptions for Guaranteed Misery in Life. Search that title. It is short, funny and the clearest statement of the method by its best known user.
- Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Charles T. Munger, edited by Peter Kaufman, 2005. Munger’s speeches collected, including the misery recipe and his talk on the psychology of human misjudgment. Big, odd and worth it.
- Pre-mortem, Wikipedia. Gary Klein’s technique. Imagine the project has failed, write the reasons, and fix them now. His 2007 Harvard Business Review piece is called Performing a Project Premortem.
Nearby ideas
- Chesterton’s fence. Before removing a rule, find out why it was put there.
- Second order effects. Every fix has consequences, and those have consequences too.
- Falsifiability. A claim that nothing could disprove tells you nothing.
- The broken window fallacy. Destruction makes visible work and hides the cost of what was lost.
- The map is not the territory. Every model leaves something out, and that is where it fails.
- The pre-mortem. Imagine the project has already failed, then ask why, before it starts.
- The prisoner’s dilemma. Why two sensible people can both choose the worst outcome.
- The Overton window. Ideas move from unthinkable to normal before politicians touch them.