Keep It Simple

I may be dating myself here, but have you ever heard of a Rube Goldberg machine? The image accompanying this blog post is an example. The venerable source Wikipedia defines them thus, “A Rube Goldberg machine, named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is a chain reaction-type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and overly complicated way. Usually, these machines consist of a series of simple unrelated devices; the action of each triggers the initiation of the next, eventually resulting in achieving a stated goal.” Why am I thinking about Rube Goldberg machines? Because they resemble too many theory papers I see. They have too many pieces and moving parts, articulate overly complex and untestable relationships, and try to make a simple process or relationship seem far more complex than it needs to be.

Theory provides a story about the connections between phenomena, and why (big emphasis on why) actions, events, structures, thoughts, or feelings occur. Bob Sutton and Barry Staw (1995) argued that good theory has both simplicity and interconnectedness. A good theory starts with one or two conceptual statements, and then proceeds to build a logically detailed case, but one that’s easy to follow because it clearly carries the simple but powerful premise through the entire story. The most influential theory articles generally have a simple but powerful premise that underlies them. If you ask someone if they know what the article is about, they may not be able to recite all the details, but odds are they can articulate that simple premise.

A great example is the classic “Upper echelons: The organization as a reflection of its top managers” by Don Hambrick and Phyllis Mason (Hambrick & Mason, 1984). One sentence in the second paragraph of the introduction captures this article’s core insight: “Organizational outcomes—both strategies and effectiveness—are viewed as reflections of the values and cognitive bases of powerful actors in the organization.” Prior to its publication, strategy scholars studied strategic decisions as entities somehow separate from the people that made them. This simple but powerful insight spawned a revolution in strategy research on upper echelons (comprised of a company’s top management team and board of directors). Hambrick and Mason grounded their theoretical argument in the behavioral theory of the firm (Cyert & March,1963, March & Simon, 1958), combining arguments on selective perception with the observation that upper echelon members will have different cognitive bases and values that are shaped by, and reflected in their personal characteristics (age, education, functional background, socioeconomic roots, etc.) to argue that upper echelon members’ personal characteristics will shape the types of environmental information they attend to, the way they interpret it, and thus their strategic choices. These strategic choices in turn will affect firm performance.

That, in a nutshell, is their theory. They then go one to develop a series of more specific propositions (twenty-one, actually) about how different characteristics will lead to different strategic actions, and how different strategic actions will lead to different firm performance outcomes contingent on various environmental conditions. But the preceding paragraph captures the heart of their theory, and countless other scholars have used their insight to explore a plethora of characteristics, circumstances and outcomes that have enriched our theoretical understanding of strategic decision making.

Coming up with a simple premise, however, is hardly a simple matter. As any good entrepreneur or product designer will tell you, it’s a lot easier to come up with an overly complicated Rube Goldberg device than it is to really boil something down and understand its essence and function in a simple, but powerful way. This means lots of thinking, lots of rewriting, and lots of simplifying to get to the core set of assumptions that provide the basis for true insight.

A useful tool you can employ when trying to simplify your theorizing is “the rule of three.” Every good storyteller uses it. Humans can hold only three to seven items in working memory. We also like to think in patterns, and three is the smallest number of items that can establish a pattern or progression. That’s why, to borrow from Schoolhouse Rock, “Three is a Magic Number.” This doesn’t mean you can only have three items in your theory, but it does suggest that your theory will be easier to understand and follow if readers can at least break it into chunks of three.

I was reading a recent article by Joyce (Xinran) Wang, Rhonda Reger and Mike Pfarrer in the Academy of Management Review (Wang, Reger & Pfarrer, 2021) that prompted me to think of this. They built their theoretical model of the social disapproval management process in the social media era around three actions (prevention, containment, attenuation), three social media characteristics (velocity, emotionality, and community) and three contingencies (event severity, actor prominence, and message inauthenticity). By chunking their nine component model into three components with three dimensions each, they make it easier to comprehend and remember.

So, when you are working on a theory paper, if you cannot state your theory’s major premise in one, or at most two sentences, and you have an exhaustive, and exhausting, list of constructs (that can’t be divided into threes) that are combined in a indecipherable mix of swoops, arrows, interactions and mediations, step back, use the rule of three, and simplify, simplify, simplify.

References

Hambrick, D.C. & Mason, P. 1984. Upper echelons: The organization as a reflection of its top managers. Academy of Management Review, 9(2): 193-206.

Wang, X., Reger, R.K. & Pffarer, M.D. 2021. Faster, hotter and more linked in: Managing social disapproval in the social media era. Academy of Management Review, 46(2): 275-298.