From Fractals to Focus

Mandelbrot sets helped me better understand businesses.

My laptop screen illuminated to show a colourful animation.

“So, you’re saying this entire animation is created with just a few lines of code?”, asked my wife.

“Yeah, basically. It’s known as a Mandelbrot set. Regardless of how far you zoom in to a Mandelbrot set, there’ll always be more detail to reveal”, I replied.

“How can such simple rules create something so seemingly complex?”, pondered my wife.

Something in my head clicked.

Both nature and business can seem complex. But in both nature and business, many phenomena can often be explained by just a few underlying causes.

In nature, gravity can help explain falling objects, tides, orbits, and even black holes.

Likewise in businesses, a focus on cost reduction can explain growing lead times, unhappy customers, customers leaving for competitors, and reducing profit. Just one or few causes can explain many phenomena.

As mathematician Grant Sanderson suggests, “Complexity doesn’t have to emerge from complex rules. It’s possible for complex phenomena to emerge from very, very simple rules.”

Continues Steve Tendon, “In businesses there cannot be any complexity, because everything therein has been created by us. We are the causes of what is there. If it seems complex, it is just because we have not joined the dots.”

So, the world around us is often simpler than we conceive. Few underlying causes can explain many phenomena.

In businesses, understanding and focusing our efforts on the few causes behind many negative phenomena means we can tackle many problems at their root. In this case, shifting focus away from cost reduction can not only improve lead times, but customer happiness and profits too. Buy 1, get 2 free.

The takeaway? Business, nature, and the Mandelbrot set are often inherently simple. By focusing efforts on the few underlying causes behind undesirable phenomena, we can create widespread improvement with limited effort. Buy one, get many free.

PS: See the Mandelbrot set animation for yourself here.
PPS: This article was inspired by deGrasse Tyson and Sanderson.

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Dash to Discovery Before Delivery

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Variation vs. Victory