A decision’s ceiling

In the early 1950s, Malcolm McLean, who had started out as a truck driver in North Carolina, spent hours sitting at the docks watching the cargo of his trucks getting loaded onto ships. Armies of longshoremen spent days manually packing sacks of coffee, barrels of oil and crates of fabric into the dark hulls of ships like a chaotic game of Tetris.

The whole industry at the time was focused on one question. How do we make the men pack faster? Malcolm McLean asked a different one. What is the option that should be here, but isn’t? He realized the ship and the truck shouldn't be two different things. What if the truck bed itself is the container?

In 1955, he sold his massive, highly profitable trucking company - then the fifth-largest fleet in America - and bought a broken-down steamship company. On April 26, 1956, his converted tanker, the SS Ideal-X, carried the first 58 standardized metal boxes from New Jersey to Texas. It dropped the cost of loading cargo from $5.83 per ton to just $0.16 per ton (Levinson, 2006).

Illusion of fixed constraints

When we face a problem, our brains often just accept the boundaries of the situation as fixed. We treat the rules of the market, the habits of our industry or current technical limitations as solid walls.

Psychologists call this "functional fixedness", a cognitive bias that limits us to using an object or a concept only in the way it is traditionally used (Duncker, 1945). We focus entirely on how to maneuver within the grid we’ve been given. You get handed a nice wooden chessboard and immediately start to play chess. But the chessboard in its essence is just a board and there are many things you can do with a board. You could play Othello. ​Also called Reversi - the two players take turns placing double-sided discs on an 8x8 grid to trap and flip their opponent's pieces, aiming to own the majority of the board by the final move Or why not use it as a cutting board?

One board, three uses

The board is the same in all three. Only the use we hand it changes and the last one stops treating the squares as rules.

Functional fixedness happens far from any chessboard. A team is handed a budget and spends a month arguing about how to split it to make ends meet. A job description lists six duties and nobody asks what lies beyond them. An org chart shows who reports to whom and leaves a team stuck, with nobody walking down the hall to the person who could actually help. In each case we work with what is already drawn out.

But some professions are trained to look at what is not there. They use a mental model that is centuries old.

The presence of absence

What is an architect actually creating when they plan a house? Walls, floors and ceilings are the obvious answer, since a house is built out of them. Some might say so, but great architects don't; they create emptiness, as we don't live in walls, floors or ceilings but in the emptiness they happen to enclose. A room is only a room if there are walls, but the room is exactly everything except the walls. The technical term is negative space (Zevi, 1957).

As early as the sixth century BC, the Chinese philosopher Laozi described exactly this duality in a famous parable.

Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness, that their use depends. - Translated by James Legge (1891)

This ancient duality is closely mirrored in the Japanese concept of Ma (間), which translates roughly to 'negative space,' 'gap' or 'pause.' Unlike Western perspectives that often view empty space as a vacuum to be filled, Japanese aesthetics treat Ma as an active, vital element. The character itself is a sun shining through a gateway. The outer part 門 is a gate or door, the inner part 日 is the sun and together they form Ma 間. Ma treats that emptiness as an active, intentional force. It is not the absence of something; it is the presence of absence.

Negative Space

Not one of the shapes has a full outline, but we still see them clearly.

In our everyday lives, we are conditioned to focus on the tangible - the things we can see, touch and count. We measure progress by what we add and define situations by what is present. Yet, just as a house cannot function without its void, intellectual and structural problems cannot be truly understood by looking only at their visible components. Therefore one must learn to look away from the "solid matter".

Inverse option engineering

We are taught to build by adding parts. Inverse option engineering is the art of creating choice by mapping the vacancy. It is understanding that the most valuable option is never the one hidden in the deck of cards you’ve been dealt.

Many problems are easier to solve backwards. The mathematician Carl Jacobi told his students to always invert and Charlie Munger carried the line into investing, asking first what would guarantee failure and only then how to succeed. Applied to options the inversion runs from the end. Instead of asking which of these should I pick, you ask which options would have to exist for this to go well.

When we see the raw material we can ask which options we want to have to decide from. So you design backward from the ideal outcome (Newell & Simon, 1972).

Working back from the outcome

None of the options in hand reaches the outcome. That is the moment to stop choosing from the list and derive the option the outcome implies.

Inverse option engineering turns you into an architect and as a good one you focus on the negative space. Only once the desired voids are mapped, you construct the rigid structures that create as well as protect them.

Dmitri Mendeleev worked this way with the elements. When he arranged the sixty or so known elements by weight and behavior in 1869, the pattern had holes in it.

He did not close them up to make the table look finished. He left the cells empty and described what should sit there, its weight, its density and how it would bond. Six years later a French chemist isolated gallium. Mendeleev read the reported density and wrote back that it had been measured wrong. It had.

Applied to decision making

A decision can only be as good as the best option on the table.

A perfect choice between three bad options is still a bad option. Therefore most of a decision is settled before the deciding starts, in the moment when you accept what to consider as options.

Negative space in a decision

The options exist before anyone lists them. What gets listed is only whatever the walls happen to enclose.

Most people only ever look at the walls of their decisions. The true leverage of decision making is refusing to choose from what already exists and looking at the negative space instead. It comes down to one question. What is the option that should be here, but isn’t?