Difference between revisions of "Brian hours"

Revision as of 16:00, 1 July 2020

The more thought you give a problem the better the solution. It's common sense, don't you think? It's also true. But that doesn't stop some people from ignoring the facts and ploughing on with their own, flawed ideas. And they are almost always flawed, and direclty so due to the lack of thought. So let's see why.

Time is a scarce resource. This concept will be familiar to anyone who has been involved with any project in any field at any time. It encourages rushing. But that is not necessarily a problem if we rush in the right direction. i.e. If you adopt the right solution, it doesn't matter how long it takes. If you adopt the wrong solution, it matters. It matters a lot. Clients will not want to pay for your mistakes, nor will your boss.

Let's take a common situation: a client (or their representative) is helping design the solution. When faced with a problem, they think about it, and come up with a solution. They used their one brain for a number of hours. If there are two people coming up with a solution independently from each other, there will be two brains. If there are two people arriving at a consensus, there is one brain. In a room of N people, there is only 1 person speaking - all other brains are being led by that one and are not thinking independently. This is why brainstorming only works when no one is in control of the whiteboard. Furthermore, it works best when operating in silence (in as much as possible), freeing all the brains present to think at their own speed and in their own directions. It can be useful to identify how many brains are actively thinking, and the number of hours they have to think.

In our scenario, the client thought for five hours before coming up with their solution. It might be right or wrong or, most likely, somewhere in between. One thing we can usually be sure of is that had more brain power been involved (more brain hours), the prospective solution would be better.

Remember that the law of diminishing returns applies to problem solving. At some point, any additional brain power is a waste of energy and offers negligble benefits, so you need to know when to go with what you've got.

Brain hours in action

Please design a layout for Facebook's news feed. You have 10 hours.

But I can tell you now, if you came up with anything that is not exactly the same as Facebook's current news feed (whatever it is), you came up with an inferior solution.

How can I be so sure? Brain hours. You invested 10 brain hours in your solution, but Facebook developers (let's say, 20) invested many hours (let's say, 5,000) in getting to their current design. 10,000 brain hours versus your 10. It doesn't mean Facebook's solution is 1,000 times better than yours, but it does mean it's better.

Dealing with novelty

It's a useful tool to engage when novel solutions are being proposed. If a problem has already been solved by others, it makes sense to start with the same solution rather than inventing a new, novel solution. At the very least, your first steps should be identifying specifically why their solution is wrong. Starting from the assumption that "we can do better" is rather falicious; it often disregards many brain hours of learnings of things you're unaware of as yet. Focus on reasons to reject their solutions, rather than reasons to accept your own.

"Re-inventing the wheel" is an oft-misused statement. There are times where a new type of wheel is necessary, and there are times when wheels are entirely inapproporiate.