1. Quaductionism by example

How do you combat that feeling of paralysis when a problem is too complex to tackle? The answer is quaductionism. I know what you’re thinking; you’re thinking that I just made this word up. That’s okay because I did. But only because I needed a single word that describes the tremendous power of this common and simple reductionism trick.

Whenever a problem is full of complex variations, subtleties, and exceptions – some wise person will reduce things to two key variables and chart their relationship using four quadrants. It takes a lot of skill to cut through the problem to find those two crucial variables. Once they have been identified, the problem loses its menacing nature.

Quaductionism by exampleBookmark

Perhaps the most famous example of quaductionism is the Eisenhower Method, popularised by Steven Covey’s 7 Habits…. This tackles the impossible problem of “how do I do everything”, by slicing and dicing the fundamentally complex question along two measures: urgency and importance. In Eisenhower’s words:

I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.

… and in quaductionist terms:

• Top-Left: Urgent and Important
• Top-Right: Important (but not urgent)
• Bottom-Left: Urgent (but not important)
• Bottom-Right: (neither urgent nor important)

We can immediately ignore the bottom-right quadrant, which represents things that are neither urgent nor important. We should then focus on the top-left quadrant, which is both urgent and important. If we value longevity, we can subequently tackle the non-urgent important stuff. (There is an alternative pattern whereby you “tactical yourself to death” by heading from the top-left to the bottom-left. The result is that the stuff on the top right keeps moving into the top left).

First stepsBookmark

Quaductionism itself isn’t the end of the process. It is often just the first step in breaking things down into something manageable. Once you overcome the first hurdle, you’ll probably want to add additional complexity to your model. Otherwise, you can suffer from over-simplification. Covey embraced quaductionism in his book, but he wrapped it up in a chapter that explained things in more detail. The quadrants were not the end of the story; they were the start of it.

So, if you are facing a really tough problem, seek out those two key variables and draw up quadrants to learn how they relate to each other conceptually. It will help you get past that cliff-face of complexity.

Written by Steve Fenton
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Revised Thursday, September 14, 2023

Steve Fenton is an Octonaut at Octopus Deploy and six-time Microsoft MVP for developer technologies. He’s a Software Punk and writer.

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