Overdetermination causes inefficiencies in laws, tech, and business. Spot it, remove it, and bring clarity to your product, team, and thinking.
Overdetermination. What a crazy word. In German, we call it Überbestimmung. Even better.
What do you do when you don’t know what a word means? Ask ChatGPT.
“Overdetermination refers to the phenomenon where multiple factors or causes are unnecessarily employed to explain a single event or outcome. It occurs when there is an excessive emphasis on attributing a result to numerous, often redundant, contributing factors, leading to unnecessary complexity and confusion in understanding the underlying cause.”
Does this sound familiar? Too many triggers for too few variables. The result? Endless discussions instead of real progress.
Let’s look at some overdetermination villains.
1. Parliaments
The word “parliament” stems from French, parlement. And “parler” means “to talk”.
And that’s what parliaments do. They talk and debate. And because of the different political attitudes in a parliament, every side has to give in to compromises. So the solutions emerging from parliament often suffer from overdetermination.
Tax regulations are the best example. In most countries, tax codes are several thousand pages long, and with all their loopholes, they give rise to an entire tax consultancy industry, and endless appeal processes. What would a simple solution look like? Tax everybody at the source. Tax salaries and revenues every month.
There are millions of examples of how regulation creates overdetermination and kills innovation and progress. De-regulate to simplify our complex world.
2. Administrators
Parliamentary work usually results in laws and regulations. Those are then passed down to be enforced.
Administrators see their purpose in enforcing laws and regulations. Whilst law abidance is no doubt important in a democracy, the abundance of laws and regulations is the core problem. Administrators take up every law and regulation and enforce it — no matter if it fuels overdetermination or not.
That’s a problem for entrepreneurs. They take a lighter stance on regulations than administrators. Not because they don’t want to abide by the law, but because laws and regulations are not their core business. Overdetermination in laws and regulations means that you can spend your entire day discussing possible ways forward, instead of spending your time on your customers and your product.
Here is an example from Yonder, the B2B SaaS company I co-founded. One of our customers engaged us in a month-long discussion about our license model — that is, after the signature of the contract. It went so far that they requested a feature to graphically evaluate the license usage. We turned the request straight down, as license usage evaluation is not our core business.
3. Engineers
A little self-criticism to wrap things up. I am an engineer, and like many engineers, I am attracted to complex problems.
Engineers tend to create data models with enormous amounts of parameters, ready to map any complexity the world has ever seen and ever will see in the future.
Think again. Before you complain about parliaments and administrators for the next time, start at your own doorstep and get complexity and overdetermination out of your product.
