Thought Experiment Thursday: Structured Thinking
Find big answers by asking many small questions
The best way to learn structured thinking is to ask pointless questions.
How much toilet paper is sold in France each year? How many miles of train tracks are there in Germany? What’s the height of the building across the street?
“What’s the point of trying to answer a question when I can just google it?” The point is to structure your thinking. To use logic, practice deduction, and build a big answer by asking many small questions — a skill that, unlike looking things up, will still help you when you face questions whose answers aren’t google-able.
Structured thinking turns you into a person who methodically breaks down problems and then solves them piece by piece rather than worrying, guessing, or raising your shoulders in absolute cluelessness. You can learn the gist of it in just a few minutes.
Here’s an example: How many customers visit your favorite restaurant every year?
I live in Munich. My favorite restaurant is called Lemongrass, a Vietnamese place around the corner. I’ll start with big numbers and move into smaller ones, but you could also do the opposite. Starting on either end helps.
First, you ask one question: What do I know? I know 1.5 million people live in Munich. I’ll assume two thirds live in the city center. That’s one million. Is this accurate? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that making an assumption allows you to further break down the problem. Then, you iterate from there.
There are about 10 neighborhoods in the city. That’s 100,000 people per neighborhood, so we’ll assume just as many live reasonably close to Lemongrass.
If you eat out for every meal not counting breakfast, that’s 14 times per week. Knowing myself and other young professionals, 10 times isn’t a stretch. Older people and families eat out less; others don’t eat out at all. What do you think is a conservative average? 3? Good! Let’s run with that. That’s 300,000 meals eaten in restaurants in my neighborhood each week.
Next, counting a few of the restaurants in my area, I can multiply that number for a rough guess of the total in my neighborhood. Let’s say it’s 100 restaurants. If meals were spread equally, that’d be 3,000 meals per restaurant — including Lemongrass.
Now, let’s do some vetting to see if our numbers could even be remotely right: Can Lemongrass serve 3,000 people per week? The restaurant is open 12 hours/day, 7 days a week. That’s 84 hours. The place holds 25 people, and the food is served quickly, within 5 minutes on average. To account for the fact that many people take away the food, let’s assume the average time spent at the restaurant is only 15 minutes on top of the waiting time. That’s 3 rounds of servings per hour at full capacity — 75 meals per hour, or 6,300 per week. Even if the place is only at capacity 50% of the time, 3,000 customers per week is doable!
Finally, let’s say Lemongrass is closed 2 weeks of the year, be it for vacation, illness, or else. At 50 weeks, that’s about 150,000 customers per year, and that’s the answer to our question. Is it 100% correct? Definitely not. Is it in the right order of magnitude? Probably. It’s also one of those questions to which you can’t google the answer, which is what makes structured thinking so valuable.
Based only on your limited experience, you can learn from extrapolations. For Lemongrass, we could now estimate their revenue, operating costs, and find potential problems — and then even solutions to those problems. This skill also isn’t limited to business. Creative chains of questions work in all areas of life.
Neil deGrasse Tyson once told a story about two job candidates being asked another one of those pointless questions we mused about at the beginning: What’s the height of the building across the street? One of them happened to know the answer. The other went outside, measured the building’s shadow against her own, and gave a rough estimate. “Who are you gonna hire?” Tyson asked. “I’m hiring the person who figured it out. ’Cause that person knows how to use the mind in a way not previously engaged.”
Structured thinking isn’t just smart, it’s innovative. The word “structure” makes it sound like you’re removing the creativity from your thinking process, but actually, the opposite is true: Structured thinking enables creativity — because creativity thrives on constraints. Only within the right boundaries can your thoughts roam freely and slowly build on top of one another.
Go on. Take 3 minutes. Pick another question. Become an innovative problem-solver, and then benefit from that ability for the rest of your life. After all, as Tyson put it: “When you know how to think, it empowers you far beyond those who know only what to think.”
-Nik
About Thought Experiment Thursday: We can’t solve our problems with the same thinking that created them. Science estimates we have 7 thoughts per minute. That’s a lot of chances to change our thinking. So, on Thursdays, that’s what we’ll practice.
A question opens the mind. A statement closes it. Let’s keep ours wide open.