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Fresh Perspective Interview with Matthew E May

Written by Aaron Pinkston, Mon, Dec 21 2009
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Fresh Perspectives is an interview series on Mondays to help get your week off to a fresh start. This week, I had the honor of asking Matthew E. May questions about simplicity, marketing, financial confusion, and how he gets a fresh perspective. Matt is an author of two books and has shown up on the Open Forum and others, including his own blog In Pursuit of Elegance. If you ever find yourself trying to solve problems, you should check out his work.

AP: You’ve written two books. In your most recent book, In Pursuit of Elegance, you focus so much (but not all) on design and the origination of ideas. From a traditional marketing perspective, that is one quarter of the game. How should the ideas of elegance impact the rest of an organization?

MM: I define elegance as the pairing of uncommon simplicity with surprising power, and it is about the pursuit of the maximum effect with the minimum means... in whatever you’re attempting to do. The concept is applicable whether you’re talking about a strategy, a product, a performance, a process, or a service. Scientists, mathematicians, and engineers search for theories that explain highly complex phenomena in stunningly simple ways. Artists use white, or “negative” space to convey visual power. Musicians and composers use pauses in the music – silence – to create dramatic tension. In Japan, architects and martial artists pursue shibumi, a word appropriately without definition but meaning, very loosely translated, “effortless effectiveness”. Physicians draw on the Occam’s razor principle in an effort to find a single diagnosis to explain the entirety of a patient’s symptoms, shaving the analysis down to the simplest explanation. It’s a universal approach to anything and everything. So in a world with shrinking resources and severe constraints, it’s not a part of the game. It is the game.

AP: Why are elegant ideas so hard to create and sometimes even harder to convey?

MM: Elegance is essentially a subtractive approach to things. It’s about restraint, refusal, reduction, and refusal. To what? To adding and acting versus subtracting and thinking. Doing less, sometimes even doing nothing, doesn’t come naturally or easily. We are natural-born adders, hardwired to push, collect, hoard, store, and consume. When neuroscientists examine brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they notice that activities involving subtraction light up an entirely different part of the brain than those involving addition. Subtraction is indeed a different way of thinking. So elegance, being subtractive, is quite elusive. It’s counterintuitive.

Suppose, for example, you’re on an African photo safari and are just about to click the perfect shot of a mother hippopotamus and her calf when she decides to charge. If you’re like most people, you’d run so fast the cheetahs would be jealous – and yet, National Geographic adventure journalist Boyd Matson told me that even if you can run the hundred-yard dash in nine seconds flat, that’s exactly what you shouldn’t do. And he should know – charging mama hippos are part of a day’s work for Boyd. As Boyd suggests, you should stand perfectly still – in other words, do nothing. But that’s hardly easy when an angry two-ton beast is barreling toward you.

And, if I told you to do nothing for the next five minutes, my bet is you couldn’t – you would undoubtedly do something during that time. What we normally think of as the easiest thing in the world to do – nothing – is in reality often the hardest.

AP: You mentioned that part of the way to begin to approach simple yet powerful solutions is to begin removing the unnecessary. I believe a lot of confusion and frustration with financial products comes from them being overly complicated. If you were designing financial products, where would you start removing and why?

MM: I’d think about two things: value and risk. From a customer’s point of view, you’d want the most value and least risk. Start removing anything that doesn’t add value, to the extent the law allows it. As for risk, it’s all about visibility. We’re intelligent enough to make good decision when risk is visible and transparent. Hide it, and we depend on others who may not have our best interests at heart. So remove anything that gets in the way of clear identification of risk.

AP: Clarity and transparency. I like it. Sounds like you described something familiar.

In the section on sustainable solutions, you discuss realizing solutions that already exist or almost exist. But the problem is what others might call the “curse of knowledge”. What can we do to help step away from our own experiences to realize better and better solutions?

MM: People don’t want products and services, they want solutions to problems. You can sell a fancy shovel, but what I want is a hole in the ground, not your shovel. The point is to design from the customer back. And to understand the customer’s problem, you can’t just ask them what the problem is. They don’t always know what they want, can’t always articulate it in a way that’s helpful, the problem may change next week, and they may not tell the truth anyway. So you need to take a market-in approach: observe them, become them, and involve them in the design of the solution. One of my favorite quotes is from urban designer Ben Hamilton-Baillie, who told me that:

“What’s wrong with how we engineer things is that most of what we accept as the proper order of things is based on assumptions, not observations. If we observed first, designed second, we wouldn’t need most of the things we build.”

AP: Part of the reason I started the Fresh Perspectives series is to celebrate Mondays and help people get each week started right. What do you love about Monday?

MM: That’s there’s only one a week.

AP: Fair enough! Perhaps people wish they could apply the principle of Subtraction to their week.


Last week, I talked with J Money from Budgets Are Sexy about art, marketing, marriage and more. Check it out.