There’s a particular moment when your mental model of a thing becomes something else entirely. This happens when you add a second dimension to something that was previously just a range. From a range or a spectrum, where you can only go left or right, suddenly movement and placement are liberated. Are there examples of such powerful enhancements out there?
Simon Wardley invented Wardley maps. This powerful tool for orienting yourself in business scenarios follows the pattern of adding the mighty second dimension. A product might exist on a spectrum from Genesis through Custom Built and Product to Commodity. While Genesis is the moment of the idea, its first embodiment, Commodity is something you buy in large quantities, like sugar or electricity.
That’s a single dimension. The other one is visibility within the Value Chain. Things can be invisible to their users (low Y value, deep down) or visible, such as the actual thing a person buys.
Wardley understood that these two dimensions turn his tool into a map. And you can use it like one, applying all the usual mapping techniques. You can anticipate movement. You can position yourself. The whole vocabulary of navigation can be applied to it. Not only that, but you can also create areas and terrain-like structures that can be labeled according to your needs.
Paul Graham introduces a slightly simpler take that still incorporates two dimensions in Conformism. Even without movement, areas, or navigation, simply enhancing the regular range of conventional vs. independent-minded people with another range, from passive to aggressive, makes the model much more interesting to reason about.
The model turns these dimensions into quadrants, skipping all the nuances of belonging somewhere in the middle. Still, it provides a very intriguing foundation for reasoning about one’s nature.
Lately, I’ve been performing an exercise whenever I think about a range. I try to push it a bit up and down, stretching it to see whether there’s a non-obvious candidate for a second dimension.
When I tried this and found one such candidate, it felt liberating and encouraged me to dig further. It immediately gave me that that feeling of the penny dropping: something bigger had just been discovered.
Is it always necessary to add a second dimension? Does it always make a model better? Clearly not. Still, it’s worth considering as a way of expanding your way of thinking.