First Principles Thinking Checklist
A practice for telling real limits from inherited ones.
Most decisions get made by analogy. Someone says this is how we've always done it, or this is what the competition is doing. The room nods. Buried somewhere in the middle is an assumption nobody checked.
This 9-page checklist is the practice for finding it. Three parts. A partner exercise. A quick-reference checklist you can run in 20 minutes.
What's inside
- Why reasoning by analogy fails — and exactly when the cost shows up
- Part One: how to strip a problem to what's actually true before you start solving
- Part Two: the hard limit vs. soft limit distinction, and why most teams never make it
- Part Three: the Assumption Reversal Exercise — and why it requires a partner
- When first principles thinking is the right tool — and when it isn't
- A full quick-reference checklist organized by phase
This is the practice Phil runs with teams when every solution on the table feels like a variation of the same thing. Read it once. Run Part One on your current problem. Come back to Part Three when you need a second set of eyes on what you've assumed.
Free, and stays free.
Licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0. Share it, adapt it, teach with it. Two things in return: credit Phil and Innovation Tools, and pass the license forward.
Anyone can have the idea. Few make the call.
More details
- 9 pages, PDF
- Print-friendly layout (designed for letter and A4)
- Licensed Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0
- Innovation.Tools Checklist, Vol. 02
