I recently listened to a great podcast and wanted to share it with our readers. The Morgan Housel Podcast had a short, 17-minute episode on “Universal Laws of the World.” Morgan shares laws that were originally coined in a specific scientific or economic field but apply universally across many other subject matters and fields. I love to consider how these ideas apply to our work supporting leadership, Lean thinking, and problem solving.
Lean East has previously shared some of the lessons from Morgan Housel’s 2020 bestseller, The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness. This short post will summarize the laws Morgan shares in the podcast, but the podcast is only 17-minutes long so we recommend you find it on Spotify or another service and listen to Morgan’s thoughts after you read our summary.
Brandolini’s Law
Brandolini shared this adage in 2013 after reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and watching an Italian political talk show. This reminds me of the “Dunning Kruger Effect” – the more you know about a subject the more you will realize how much you don’t understand.
I see this all the time when scrolling a social media app. Click-bait stories are there with titles that sound crazy. Every time I click on the story to read more, I realize the headline is misleading. Most people don’t bother to read the details or review the original source themselves. It is much easier to believe the snippet or headline, even when it is BS.
Littlewood’s Law
Miracles are considered very rare, “one in a million” types of events. Yet all of us experience thousands of events every day, or millions of events in our lives and our world every month. Littlewood comes to the following logical conclusion:
- If a miracle is a one-in-million event,
- and we experience millions of events per month,
- therefore, we will experience “miracles” on a monthly basis!
Littlewood is using the law of large numbers to debunk how special miracles really are. Applied to the larger world, so many occurrences happen in our lives that we shouldn’t be surprised by a miracle!
Dollo’s Law
This law is based on the Charles Darwin idea of natural selection and related to the scientific concept of entropy I learned about in college. According to Author and Biologist Richard Dawkins, the law is “really just a statement about the statistical improbability of following exactly the same evolutionary trajectory twice (or, indeed, any particular trajectory), in either direction”.
Morgan applies this law to company brands (Nike, Volkswagen, etc.) Once consumers lose trust in the brand of a company it is very hard for the company to rebuild the brand to where it was.
Parkinson’s Law
This is a law I have observed in the past and still fall victim to myself. It is why we all need to set many intermediate deadlines in a project to make progress.
Morgan refers to the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter a few years ago. Twitter had enough money to hire a large staff, so it did. These employees all found work to stay busy and justify their position. It was only when Musk focused on who was performing value that he realized that many of the employees in middle management not only weren’t providing value in the process but didn’t even understand the process! He ended up firing over 75% of the Twitter employees.
Sayre’s Law
In other words, we bicker more when the stakes are low. When the stakes are high (matters of war, pandemics, etc.) people tend to put their differences aside and come together.
I have unfortunately experienced the truth in this law myself too many times. It is related to my observation that a social media comment’s quality (and kindness) is inversely proportional to the commenter’s relationship with the person who left the original post.
Stigler’s Law
I laughed when I heard this simple law. The story is that Stigler himself actually attributed the discovery of Stigler’s law to sociologist Robert K.Merto. In other words, Stigler admits that he is not the discoverer!
Morgan shares how most of us focus on the person who popularizes a discovery and invention rather than the inventor. If I ask, “who invented the iPhone?” you will probably answer “Steven Jobs.” The reality is that Jobs had an entire team of thousands at Apple that came up with this product, which was an outgrowth from the many others who created the iPod before it. We all just answer “Jobs” because it is the easy, simple response.
Hickam’s Dictum
Hickam was a doctor who also said, “A man can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases.” His dictum is a counterargument to the use of Occam’s razor in the medical profession.
I come across this issue all the time as I help team’s solve complex problems. Any complex system is likely to have many variables and problems, not just one or two simple causes with simple solutions. These causes are also likely to interact in complex ways.
The Lean East team helps get to the root cause and improve complex processes because if they were easy they would already have been solved!
Summary
We hope you enjoyed learning about these seven Universal Laws, as much as we enjoyed hearing them. Please check out the Morgan Housel podcast to hear his explanation of the laws.
Let us know other “laws” you have come across that seem to apply universally in the comments below!
