Occam's Misquote
an axiom for heuristics, or something like that.
This is a story that starts the way most of my stories do - with a simple conversation somehow turning into me ranting about a thing that I take more seriously than normal people do.
In this case, it was a discussion of how often the actual reason something is happening, is far more boring than the theories people develop to explain that thing happening. Boring isn’t bad, btw. We put fluoride in the water for the boring reason of reducing tooth decay, regardless of how animated Alex Jones-types get about the idea it has a more sinister purpose.
My problem, however, came up immediately after this point - the tendency to confuse “boring” with “simple” - as in “the simplest explanation is usually the correct one”.
So let’s talk about how you don’t actually know Occam’s Razor.
You have, for most of your life, probably heard the heuristic of Occam’s Razor explained as “the simplest explanation is usually the correct one”. And there’s an elegance to the idea that (for example) despite a complex murder mystery being thrilling, in the real world the killer is probably a close associate of the victim, with a predictable motive. It makes sense to use this as a lens to analyze problems, because unnecessarily complicating things is always a poor strategy for making sense of them.
But that’s not actually Occam’s Razor. A closer to original wording of William of Ockham’s idea would be “entities should not be multiplied needlessly”.
This is a notably different idea than the popularized version. “Don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be” is not the same thought as “simplest is most likely right”. The simplified version of Occam’s Razor is itself, an oversimplification.
This is where I bring up a less popular (but equally useful) heuristic, Hickam’s Dictum.
Hickam (a doctor) is reported to have said something like “the patient can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases”. In addition to being a fun thing to yell in a meeting, it has the benefit of being realistic: in complex systems, unexplained or confusing problems can (and usually do) have more than one cause. That doesn’t mean you need to address every cause. But it does mean that the work of actually understanding a problem, is just as important as the pursuit of simplicity. If you haven’t identified all or most of the problems, you have no way of knowing if you’re picking the right one. And in communications, addressing a problem is often very resource intensive; you don’t have the time or the budget for another national campaign if the ‘simplest’ explanation doesn’t end up being correct.
IMO, heuristics work like data. One source of data makes you a danger to yourself and others - you can spin a single data point or a single heuristic, into nearly endless interpretations, with imagination and time. Two or more counterbalance each other, and force you to at least consider the complexity of what you’re being asked to figure out.
Anyone who references Occam’s Razor should probably 1) know the actual concept and not the Coles notes from high school philosophy, and 2) be able to reference at least one other philosophical heuristic (without googling).
This is incredibly important in my day to day because, in advertising, simplicity is actually essential. But we have a tendency to confuse “simple” with “clear” or “correct” or “good”.
Simplicity in a key message or an idea is mandatory, almost all of the time. But that doesn’t mean the problem is inherently simple, or that the audiences are connected by a simple thread, or that insight into your problem can’t have nuance or complexity. It can be incredibly complex to figure out what simple thing you need to say or do.
It’s okay if the story that gets you to a focused message is complex, as long as it’s very very clear how you got from a complex situation to a simple idea.
I think strategy is about making the complex simple, and making the simple complex. What I mean by that is usually what makes a problem seem impossible to solve is that you have the wrong frame: either it’s simpler than you think it is, or it’s more complex than you’re giving it credit for.
This belief has, historically, driven some people up the wall. For a client with a complex product and competitive set, coming back and saying “actually we think it’ll work better if we just say this one overarching thing” requires more storytelling and presenting skill than pretty much anything else I need to do in the average week.
For a creative team that wants to create memorable, meaningful and effective ideas, insisting that “the concept needs to let us say these 4 things” (only one in any given execution, I’m not a monster) needs to come with a strategy that given them a clear connection point between those 4 items - you can’t ask them to solve a problem if you haven’t at least proven it *can* be solved.
Your job as a strategist isn’t just working with others to find a way to do things, it’s also getting people to believe in that way of doing things. The problem is, saying “the simplest explanation is usually the correct one” might convince people in the moment, but is basically just a way of saying “stop asking questions” wrapped up in a veneer of history.
But now you can avoid falling into that trap, because you know that the actual idea was “don’t make it more complicated than you need to”.