The Chamber 🏰 of Tech Secrets is open. The summer is in full swing and I have been busy with all kinds of things: lots of work, fitness, and our first vacation involving air travel with 7-month old Jackson. We took a nice 12-day trip and made stops in Portland, Mt. Rainier National Park, Hood River, Bend, Crater Lake and Cape Kiwanda.
This week, we’ll explore one of my favorite topics: Principles. Instead of talking about principles that I like or use, we’ll explore how to write a great principle. I hope you find this useful at home and in your professional endeavors. Let’s jump in!
Anatomy of a Great Principle
I am a big advocate for principles. I shared some of my own in Chamber of Tech Secrets #24: Principles and wrote about our first version of Enterprise Architecture Principles for Chick-fil-A on our Chick-fil-A Tech Blog.
Principles are important because they have the potential to become an oral or written tradition that shapes the way people think: personally, as a family, or organizationally. When the foundation for thinking is right, creative and congruent ideas can emerge and lead to actions that are “right”.
Our first round of EA principles for Chick-fil-A were good and very useful, but not great. After applying them for three years and reflecting on them, I started to ask myself what made a great principle? In re-writing a new version, I have arrived at what I believe are some great tips for writing a good principle.
Let’s dig into some principles for writing great principles, if you will.
Great principles…
Are understandable and clear: This likely goes without saying, but it is worth wrestling over each and every word of a principle to ensure its understandable and clear to a reader. Think about the least common denominator in your base of potential readers and start with their level of understanding. Ask yourself “what behaviors do I want to emerge from this principle?” Build to your key point rapidly but make sure to connect to the relevant first principles, which takes us to our second point…
Start from first principles: Great principles appeal to first principles (from the relevant discipline or context), shared cultural contexts, or other universal truths.
Are short and quippy: A great principle needs to be easy to remember and recite. It takes lots of repetition for principles to embed in people’s brains and show up in how they think. If the principle is long or complex, it is easily forgotten and loses its power.
Focus on one idea: It is easy to start “principle jamming”; stuffing many different ideas into a single principle. Avoid this. The best principles convey one key message. This will be more compelling and easier for people to remember. You can still make the principle tangible and actionable, but ensure your top level idea is the key thing the reader takes away.
Are easily expoundable: A great principle is indeed short and quippy, but may need a “double click” to help the reader internalize the idea. The presence of this accompanying material makes the principle less open to interpretation (when needed) and ensure that principles…
Are deterministic: A great principle holds up to testing from many different potential scenarios and is reinforced by these examples, not weakened by them. When approaching a principle with a question of “how should I think?” or “how should I act?”, one should emerge with a clear directional answer.
Making it tangible
Let’s make this tangible with an example. To do so, I’ll share a preview of one of our new Enterprise Architecture principles.
Understandable and clear: No matter who you are, if you read this principle you will emerge thinking that you should “think enterprise” and that two things you can do to implement that principle tangibly are to create technical interfaces and consider an enterprise stakeholder base. Why do we have this principle? Sometimes we observe that people forget to think enterprise and get overly focused on their own product or their primary business partners at the potential expense of the success of the larger organization.
Start from first principles: First, we frame the context for the principle, which is about how we think about our technology systems. Then we appeal to the idea of 1) winning in the marketplace and 2) “winning hearts every day” (internal lingo for connecting with and serving people with honor, dignity, and respect).
Be quippy: “Think Enterprise” — this is short enough to remember and quippy enough to stick, and conveys the entire spirit of the principle.
Focus on one idea: This principle tells you to remember to “think enterprise” and explains why. If this phrase sticks in people’s minds and changes the way they think, we’ve “won”.
Be expoundable: We can easily expand the idea of thinking enterprise into some ideas that are easy to execute, specifically thinking about technical interfaces,
Be deterministic: Try testing this against your own example, particularly if it’s system-related. I am trying to do X. I am worried about Y and Z. Does the principle hold up? Let me know!
Conclusion
To do all this, you need to know what you want to say and what behaviors you want the principle to drive, whether in thinking or action. If you put these tips into practice, you can create great principles that you help you influence people by changing the way people think and act, or by memorializing ideas that are important to your organization. Go forth and principle!
“The soldiers, like bands of riders on the steppe still do today, frequently sang as they rode in their small groups. In addition to singing about what soldiers always sing about—home, women, and fighting—the Mongol soldiers sang their laws and rules of conduct, which had also been set to music so that every man might know them. By memorizing the laws and constantly practicing the format of their message-songs, every man was ready, at any moment’s notice, to learn a new message, in the form of a new verse to these well-rehearsed songs, and take it where ordered.”
— Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford
https://a.co/9wPt6O9
There is this quote that popped into my head while reading article #40:
“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter." Blaise Pascal.
Great principals can greatly influence great future outcomes; the writing of short, memorable, expoundable ones are well worth the time. Blaise Pascal wrote one and it's called "Pascal's Law". Two words... now I'm curious what the principal of "Chamber's Law" will be one day. Might merit its own post!