Theory of Everything in Business: The Unuseful "Useful" Illusion

There is a shared belief that the universe is knowable. 

But is it, and does it have to be?

Physics has long been on a pursuit of reducing the complexity of the Universe to one mathematical law in a unified “Theory of Everything”. The belief that the universe is knowable and simple is what keeps us moving forward, but the reality may be beyond what our brains can perceive and understand.

As Janna Levin stated in her Big Think video, the ultimate theory of everything may not succeed (due to the challenge consolidating gravity and matter). Alan Turing, Kurt Godel, and other mathematicians concluded in the early part of the last century that there would never be a theory of everything for Mathematics. Similarly, people are starting to think more and more about the limitations of unification in Physics.

We might just not be able to know it all - and that might be ok.

The reason why I write about this is not to speak about Physics, but about the way we do the same in business (and in many other areas of our lives).

As start-ups grow and evolve, striving to understand what makes the best product, best team, and best go-to-market strategy becomes analogous to the pursuit of the “Theory of Everything” in business.

We read books, listen to podcasts, copy-paste frameworks, search for playbooks, and try to define what this “Theory of Everything” means in the context of what we are building.

Playbooks are great in theory - they provide us with frameworks to shortcut thinking. Founders are already energy drained, and hence anything that enables them to save mental energy seems like a good thing.

But “Theories of Everything” as often codified in these “playbooks” are most likely only “useful illusions” that are most likely not that useful.

(*Software engineers are specifically prone to being subject to this fallacy: they are used to lines of code that prescribe input = output. That does not translate well in business.)

The problem with "Theories of Everything" in business is they try to unify all equations and variables into a single equation, but fail to recognize that nearly every single variable they account for (other than the shared humanity of the consumer) is unique.

Every vision, product, target market, industry, team, context is unique, and therefore, there is no general theory of what you should do at any given moment.

There is no right balance of product or sales led, outbound or inbound, content and SEO, organic or paid ads, long or short sales cycles, hype or no hype marketing, strong or weak values, lean or waterfall methodology, etc that always works. It should be authentic to you and your context, and it should change over time as your variables change.

We should stop searching for patterns, and embrace anti-patterns instead.

If we think about the success of outliers, they are outliers because they do not follow the norm. Playbooks define the norm, and aim for predictable outcomes. Outliers defy the norm, and strive for unpredictable outcomes. That is what makes them extraordinary.

A "Theory of Everything" aims to be generally applicable and reproducible in science, but reproducing success is not the aim in start-ups. We want to solve problems with unique solutions that don’t yet exist.

The hard truth is: we want to believe that we can bring it all together, and that the business success formula can be reduced to a single playbook, because it makes it easy.

But if it were easy, everyone else would do it.