Some might say the first rule of first principles thinking is…
to not talk about first principles thinking.
Social media readily mocks references to mental models these days.
You’ll find more substance in a Wikipedia post than in a social media post, and that isn’t saying much. Of course, the latter’s explanation offers a promise of glory no framework can deliver without other factors.
So although it is easy to mock the utterances of such frameworks, does that mean we should dismiss their use as well?
Absolutely not.
I have an overwhelming love for first principles thinking.
Its methodology got me through one of the most significant challenges I’ve ever faced.
It came when I began working with a newly appointed general manager for a service operation.
He spent his first week asking questions and trying to understand what everyone was doing. There were teams for everything, with multiple escalations teams supporting clients, customers, and subcontractors. It seemed excessive, but he needed to prove it.
A week later, the department had its first P&L. Two days later, the architect of the multiple escalations team was gone. The department wasn’t making money. It was losing it.
I was appointed to help understand why we had so many staff and what exactly they were doing.
I remember walking into the department for the first time and feeling the weight of tension in the air. Quiet conversations stopped, eyes darted, and the hum of controlled chaos seemed to pulse through the walls.
In truth, things were not going well.
New clients were coming, but the service wasn’t to the level they’d been offered. Tensions rose with the board as clients threatened to walk away. The previous management took action—not by understanding what was wrong, but by creating teams to manage the symptoms.
It was a classic firefighting approach to problem-solving.
You don’t solve the problem; you solve the effects of the problem.
The trouble was that as one client was satisfied, so another would complain. Hence the multiple escalations teams.
As work began to make the operation profitable, a deeper question remained.
This was my task, so I wanted to understand how the system we used worked. Asking more established colleagues gave me a few insights, but the original software was ten years old at this point. No one was quite sure how it worked.
And so I began breaking down the system to its core fundamentals.
Even then, the problem wasn’t obvious.
The system worked. It received work via an API from clients and allocated it based on an algorithm that sorted jobs by skillset and location requirements.
Using these first principles, we began reasoning through possible changes. We tested changes to various settings, driven by deep curiosity to observe their impact.
Then, almost by chance, we found our Eureka moment.
One of the settings allowed jobs to queue for a subcontractor, regardless of whether he had capacity or not. This was built into the system to prevent jobs bouncing back to clients.
When we changed the limits with one subcontractor, allocating excess work to another one in the area, we found service levels went up, even though the subcontractor hadn’t completed any more work.
Ironically, we doubted ourselves.
This discovery had taken months, and we had to keep checking to make sure we were right. When we finally accepted it, there was a brief pause in the room—an almost imperceptible collective exhale, as if we had all been holding our breath.
The answer—the root cause—was simply a capacity issue.
When the subcontractor was recruited, we had been asking their total capacity, remaining ignorant of what other work they were doing.
In reality, we simply did not have enough subcontractors to handle the workload.
Without first principles thinking, we would have remained ignorant of the problem. It was a ground-level understanding that gave me the ability to find the cause.
First principles thinking is a powerful mental model.
You might shy away from talking about it, but you shouldn’t shy away from practising it.
Taking a process or a system and then removing all the bells and whistles gets you moving in the right direction. Yes, you will have to ask some pointed questions. Some might even appear foolish to others, but asking why, how, and what questions will reveal the inner workings.
Sometimes you need to reverse-engineer a process to uncover the fundamental elements that define it—I found this especially helpful when dissecting the algorithm.
What first principles thinking does is give the understanding to find root causes. But it can take time, and it is for this reason solutions appear to overcome the effect of the problem.
It’s quicker and demands less thinking time.
But it’s rarely cheaper, and as the previous management had found, it doesn’t make the problem disappear.
If you want to transcend quick fixes and discover the real drivers of your business challenges, start by stripping every assumption back to its core.
Ask the hard questions.
Challenge what everyone takes for granted.
Because only then can you build solutions that last—and teams that trust the future.
Question deeply, build clarity, and lead with lasting confidence.
