First Principles

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If you believe the world is going to end tomorrow, and your significant other doesn’t, you’re likely going to have very different opinions about what to have for dinner tonight.

You'll be inclined to go to an expensive restaurant and live it up. Maybe a great steak with some expensive wine. Why not? It's all going to end tomorrow. Your partner, on the other hand, may just want a quiet, normal night at home. Maybe order a pizza or have leftovers or make something with whatever is in the refrigerator. You may end up having a big argument about what to have for dinner tonight.

But that's not the thing you should be arguing about. You should be arguing about the first principle: whether or not the world is going to end!

This happens all the time inside of companies. Colleagues argue about the small, day-to-day issues on the ground and forget about first principles. This is perfectly understandable. When you're moving fast, you're going to run into one another on micro issues that you're not aligned on. The key is to recognize when this becomes a trend, and then pull your head up, get the right people on a call, and get aligned on the high-level first principle that’s causing the disagreement.

Here are some examples of first principles inside of a company:

We err on the side of being transparent with employees.

We should pay employees above market.

Profit margins will suffer for a while while we invest in new products.

Diversity, equality, and inclusion inside of our company is a high priority.

Employees should be able to make their own decisions on how to spend company dollars.

Often, getting alignment on first principles is easy. The hard part is pulling up and out of the day to day noise and recognizing and calling out the misalignment. It's important to create forums — meetings, Slack channels, or some kind of document — that allows people to easily surface the misalignment. Companies that do this well can avoid an enormous amount of friction and will move much faster and smoother as a result.