Gustave Doré - Dante Alighieri - Inferno - Plate 9 (Canto III - Charon)
This is not new stuff. As long as you’ve been exposed to Dante during your studies, you’ve for sure come across the number 3 many times. But, talking about business, there’s a reason for me to look to the number 3 as the reference number.
In my view, doing business is about solving customer problems. There are many problem solving techniques out there, most of which are incredibly smart and a similar number is incredibly complex to handle. The true issue is not to understand the value of such techniques but to make them usable by each single employee in one organization. Even more important is to make sure that, once a technique has been understood and socialized within the organization, it does not fade away because, being too complex, people stop using it and, after a while, they go back to “business as usual”.
When you approach a business problem, finding a solution is important, but you can’t call it a solution if you’re the only one that can implement it. This is a typical issue with consultants. They are smart, they know all the problem solving techniques, but once they are gone, your company slowly gets back into the “old troubles”, simply because the technique, due to complexity, has not entered into the company DNA.
A common pattern in all the problem solving techniques is to split a problem in little pieces and to sort it piece by piece. This is, quite often, driving to a situation where we can lose the big picture and the impact that taking a decision on one piece of the problem has on other pieces.
In the quest for simplicity, that should drive any consulting effort, we should be always considering how much our solution is helping eliminate the clutter.
Using an analogy with mathematics: how many people are capable to easily solve an equation with 4 or more variables? how many of them will feel comfortable in approaching their daily problems by trying to solve a 4 variable equation?
If we offer to a company a solution where every employee has to work on 4 or more variables, it is likely that 90+% of them will get lost. But if we move down to 3 variables or contexts to be kept in the picture it is likely that, while increasing dramatically the number of employees that can participate to the solution, we will still be able to cover most of the problem we are trying to solve.
This is why I’m fascinated by Venn Diagrams and I do believe that 3 is the perfect number.
