#sebir

Warning: compared with previous posts, this one is not so well defended. To date, my comments about Sebir innovative ideas have been based on a reasonable body of research and experimentation. This post doesn't have such a firm foundation but I think it qualifies for some exposure, even if only as a proposition that is potentially interesting to those like me who don’t get out much.

Every now and then when we hear or observe an innovative idea that is unusually effective in what it achieves, someone will say something like “But, it’s so simple!” And it’s true. Many of the best ideas we encounter possess a disarming simplicity. Once we see what has happened and how it happened, we are struck by its clarity and often, as a result, are left wondering why no one came up with the idea earlier. We wonder “Why didn't I think of that?”

Such observations are quite spontaneous. We don’t usually analyse the idea in question before we praise it – it’s an intuitive act – but if we did, what would we find?

One way to answer this question is to see such “simple” ideas as items of beauty. Beauty is a quality that exists in many arenas, probably most obviously in the arts, but it exists in other fields as well. Generally it can be found in the sciences and, more specifically, in a discipline such as mathematics.  Some of the proofs of Pythagoras’ Theorem for instance, are particularly elegant, as can be seen in this proof which is an example of mathematical beauty in method:

        (If the mention of the word ‘mathematics’ immediately causes you to doze off, please wake up for this next bit.)

Now, one of the tantalizing features of beauty is that although it is relatively normal to get a number of people to agree unanimously that something or someone is “beautiful”, it’s a lot, lot harder to get them to agree on a definition of what beauty is. Beauty is not something that it is easy to precisely explain.

But there are some clues. As an innovative idea is more at home within the sciences than within the arts, we’ll borrow from the former. In that realm, beauty and simplicity seem to result from the combination of elegance with economy of effort. And sometimes, there’s also the element of surprise.

My ears prick up at the presence of economy of effort in the beauty and simplicity equation. Because this is the essential quality of the innovative idea I call a Sebir. Sebir is a loose acronym for the catchphrase small effort : big return and it is used to describe innovative ideas where a relatively small amount of effort generates a disproportionately beneficial outcome. The best of them do this in an elegant way and often they deliver a result that is not only surprising but satisfyingly inevitable.