One example (and I’m sorry about this example, because it’s useless to anyone who isn’t a Judo player) is that ALL of Judo grip fighting can be reduced to a system of four rules.
Once you learn the four rules, you can see way more when observing a high-level match.
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The four rules:
1. Don’t let your opponent get a usable grip.
2. If your opponent gets a usable grip, break it.
3. If you can’t break it, attack.
4. If you can’t attack, get ready to defend or counter.
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The four rules pretty much becomes a syllabus for accelerating expertise.
For instance, what is a ‘usable grip’? This is different for Georgians vs Japanese vs Russian style players. Some Japanese players prefer grabbing two sleeves.
Learning ALL the usable grips becomes a goal
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In business, 7 Powers is probably the framework I think about the most that has the same ‘feel’.
The argument: the purpose of business strategy is to resist margin compression over the long term; there are really only 7 ways to do that.
Strategy is finding some path to the 7.
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I don’t mean to say that you can just learn the framework, and be immediately good. What I mean to say specifically is that good framework with this ‘feel’ allows you to filter reality in useful ways.
It allows you to observe real, messy examples and pick out cues that matter.
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For instance, in Judo you’ll quickly realise that some Japanese fighters have a very particular instantiation of the 4 rules — they don’t break grips unless absolutely necessary!
Instead, they nullify existing grips with movement and positioning. This is difficult to observe!
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In fact, as a novice, there’s probably no way that you’ll pick up on the minor, minor things that top Japanese players are doing unless you have the 4 rules to guide you.
You’ll instead be like, “hmm, that’s odd, the opponent doesn’t seem to be able to attack at all. Why?”
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With the 4 rules, you are (or at least I am!) able to go “ahh, so this is Rule 1 and Rule 3 in action.” Whereas to the uninitiated the whole match is just a flurry of unstructured action.
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In business, I’ve written before how the instantiations of 7 Powers in real world cases are just so *damn weird*: commoncog.com/7-powers-in-pr
Again, the point is that you have the framework to guide your observations.
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I struggle with articulating a generalisable property for such frameworks.
Why are some frameworks useful and others are not? Why do some feel like they’re carving reality at the joints, while others feel contrived and stupid?
I … don’t know. But I want to find out.
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Ok, I have a first stab: frameworks that work this way are a) universal, and b) exhaustive.
The four rules works because every grip fight in every judo match may be reduced down to the four rules.
7 Powers work this way because the Powers are exhaustive.
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A corollary: frameworks that are a 2x2 matrix of some kind are nearly guaranteed to not be as useful because of these two properties.
Reality rarely fits neatly into 2x2 matrices.
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I don't get 'universal' tbh - if 7 Powers was "5 powers that work for most companies, and there are a small percentage of unknown things" would it be bad?
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I think I wouldn’t lean on it as much? To be fair I can’t find simplifying frameworks for most things, so I treat nearly everything else with a modicum of “ok does this really apply here?”
This bar is so high I can only think of two examples.
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totally agree with this thread. when I’m coaching folks, I talk about needing to feel for the friction a model brings to a situation; using the model to evaluate the situation but also using the situation to evaluate the model - what Taleb refers to as “Wittgenstein’s ruler”.
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One of the challenges that I run into, though, is that when learning a new framework you often don’t have enough expertise to know if it’s actually universal and exhaustive (or whatever we decide); and it’s easy to go far down the wrong path before you figure it out.
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I didn’t in the past
But now whenever I create a generalized rule by “reducing down to common patterns” I fear the rule is insufficient
As in a total newbie armed with this rule or rules is unable to work themselves back to the instances from which the rules are derived from
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Maybe this is like that old chestnut
“planning is impt. plans are not”
The exercise of producing the simplified framework is important
The actual frameworks are not
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