Two Dimensions, Infinite Clarity

TTL 4

👋 Good Morfternight, this is Paolo Belcastro, with the fourth issue of TTL: Tools & Thoughts for Leaders.

TTL was born to simplify your leadership life: thoughts, tools, and hacks to make your work easier and more organized.

We’ve discussed how to make better decisions, how to manage workers dispersed across different times and places, and, finally, how to reevaluate your decisions.

I don’t know if you noticed, but each of those newsletters contained something that looked like this:

A vertical line, a horizontal line, four quadrants: a decision-making superhero.

This is precisely the tool we are going to elaborate on today, analyzing its pros, cons, and how-tos: the 2×2 matrix.

What is a 2×2 matrix?

A simple chart representing two dimensions.

The horizontal line represents one variable, the vertical line another.

Therefore, each box represents a different combo of the two selected dimensions.

A popular 2×2 Matrix is the Eisenhower Method for managing your task list.

It uses Urgency as one axis and Importance as the other. You then rate each task on your to-do list as urgent or not, important or not.

As a result, you’ll get these four buckets:

• Urgent / Important → Do it yourself. Now.
• Not urgent / Important → Schedule for later.
• Urgent / Not important → Delegate.
• Not Urgent / Not Important → Don’t do it – throw away.

Pretty straight-forward, right? Why is it so useful then?

The human brain: thumbs beat stars.

Our brain is excellent at comparing but struggles with analyzing.

Let’s play a little game together. Here is a gray rectangle. On a scale between 0% (black) and 100% (white) try to guess its luminosity only by looking at it, without using a color meter or looking at the code.

Remember that value, and now look at these two rectangles to find out which one is darker than the other.

If you are anything like me, you’ll probably have no precise idea of the first answer (it’s 33%, by the way) but you’ll have easily found that the left rectangle is the darkest of the bottom two even though the difference is only 2% (49% vs. 51%). By the way, if this were printed I could have used a much smaller difference, I used 2% to account for random display settings.

As a result, attempts to use our intuition to grade anything very precisely along any dimension are generally futile.

The obvious consequence is that they tend to drift towards binary choices, like it happened with Uber and Airbnb. Both companies offer a 1-5 star rating system, but in reality it has become accepted that anything below 5-star is bad and 5-star is good.

Why? Because our brains find it tough to use a broad scale to describe our experiences. We’re just better at going “love it” or “meh” than trying to give a precise score.

Netflix got the memo too and ditched their 5-star rating for a simple thumbs up or down, just like YouTube. They know people prefer quick, binary choices over fiddling with a complicated rating system. If they asked you to rate movies from 1 to 10, you’d probably just get frustrated because our brains aren’t wired to make those kinds of fine-tuned distinctions as easily as we can make snap comparisons.

(Recently, they introduced a third option to distinguish between “I like this” and “I love this” which works well when using a single dimension.)

So, the big takeaway?

Our brains are wired for making comparisons, not absolute judgments.

Overcomplicating things

In the industry, product managers often turn to RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort), BRICE (the same with the addition of Business value) or one of the many variants of scoring model for prioritization.

While both RICE and BRICE provide structured methods for prioritizing projects, they fundamentally require a group of people to score ideas across multiple dimensions with decimal precision. Inexperienced product managers—those who are enthusiastic about theories and frameworks but may become overly reliant on them— frequently turn to these models hoping to find clarity, only to find themselves tangled up in the details and making things more complicated than necessary.

Asking engineers, designers, and stakeholders on a project to rate ideas on those dimensions on a scale from one to five, or one to ten even with integer precision only leads to irrelevant results and is fundamentally a way to not assume responsibility for the decisions by “using math” instead.

A 2×2 matrix is better for quick decision-making because it simplifies complex choices by focusing on just two key factors, making it easy to visualize and prioritize options.

It is also crucial to underline that the matrix has four quadrants and is not meant to compare the relative positions of items within the same quadrant. This is not about ranking things precisely along each axe, but only assessing on which side of the center they are.

Two, the perfect number

We need two dimensions to easily make decisions.

One isn’t enough: Without additional context, decisions can become too simplistic, leading to errors. For example, picking a job based only on salary, without considering job satisfaction or location, might result in a poor choice.

Three is too much: Too many factors can overwhelm our brains, slowing down decision-making and leading to poorer outcomes. Remember that the number of choices grows exponentially with the number of dimensions, so with three you now have eight possible results.

Two dimensions hit the sweet spot by offering a balance between simplicity and detail, giving us just enough context to make informed decisions without overloading our brains.

Remember this: the 2×2 matrix is a tool to supplement System 1 thinking with just a bit of rationality, to make it bearable in situations where one would prefer to shift to System 2, but doesn’t have access to more data than what’s coming from experience and intuition.

When to use the matrix

The 2×2 matrix has some great perks:

1. Clarity: It lays out options in four clear quadrants, making comparisons a breeze.
2. Simplicity: With just two variables, it cuts through complexity and keeps things straightforward.
3. Speed: Quick to use, it helps you make decisions fast.
4. Focus: Highlights the key factors, so you don’t get bogged down by minutiae.
5. Actionable Insights: Reveals priorities and next steps, helping you make smart moves.
6. Ease of Use: Super user-friendly—no fancy tools or extensive training needed!

It’s simple, it’s clear, it’s fast.

When not to use it

The 2×2 matrix is a great tool, but it’s much like a screwdriver: great for screws, but not so much for driving a nail.

It forces binary choices without room for nuance.

If you need to account for subtle differences and multiple variables, it will oversimplify the situation.

Avoid using a 2×2 matrix when your decision requires nuanced judgment, you have reliable data at hand, and can proceed to detailed analysis.

Also, when you feel the need to position some of your options precisely in each quadrant, it’s probably the wrong tool.

In such cases, more sophisticated frameworks are appropriate.

The 2×2 matrix is best suited for quick, high-level comparisons rather than in-depth research.

That’s it for today.

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Here on TTL, we dig into practical leadership tips and effective strategies, with a particular focus on tech leadership and managing distributed teams (that’s what I do every day, add me on LinkedIn).

Whether you’re steering a tech startup or leading a remote team, these insights are designed to help you navigate the complexities of modern leadership.

I also publish on paolo.blog and monochrome.blog

Cheers,