How to deep think about an unfamiliar field?

I read this article written in 2018 on a WeChat official account (WeChat ID: lxianshengmiao). It started by introducing a popular movie, named “Dying to Survive”, then talked about how you can deep think about the medicine industry behind the scene. I was impressed by the approach taken when analyzing the industry that the author had no experience with, so I thought I would translate it to share with the audience here. If you can read Chinese, here’s the link to the original post.

The most popular movie recently, is definitely “Dying to Survive”.

Till the time that I’m writing this article, there are 370,000 comments on Douban, with a review 9.0 out of 10. Among Chinese movies these years, this is a phenomenal piece.

However, we’re not talking about the movie today, because I haven’t watched it, yet.

I want to use this movie as an example to talk about: how to deep think an unfamiliar field.

To start with, I have to confess, I have no background knowledge of the medical industry at all. That means, I’m at the same position as any reader can be(If you work at the medical industry, then you’re more professional than me).

So, for a field like this, unfamiliar at all, how would you think and do analysis about it?

I browsed through the brief introduction of the movie, below is the main story(spoiler alert, and if I’m wrong, please point out):

A pharmaceutical company developed a medicine for a special disease, and are selling it at a really high price within China. A lot of patients can’t afford the medicine. However, in India, not far away, there’re generics drugs which are sold at a really cheap price, and are not allowed to enter the Chinese market. A Chinese business man, Yong Cheng, started to help the patients to “import” the generics.

There are three main voices against the reality reflected from the movie.

The first is to criticize the pharmaceutical company, saying they only go after the profits, never provides reasonable prices. If not for the generics drugs dealers, patients would never get basic right of life.

This point of view, in my opinion, is a relatively low level of thinking. Because he/she only sees the simplest, the outermost layer of the cause, without thinking one more step, on the long term results, root cause and other facts, letting the emotions dominate rational thinking.

This is what we should avoiding.

The second is to think, pharmaceutical companies need to survive too. if not for profits, who has the money to do the hard research?

These type of audiences can see that, producing generics, sabotaging the medical patents, seems to be doing good for the patients, but it’s actually doing harm to the pharmaceutical companies, lowering the motivation of the companies to do medical research. Thus from a long term perspective, it’s not good for growth of the pharmaceutical industry.

In this situation, there’s only one disease to be cured: poor disease.

This point of view, is better, it can see long term effects and results. It can still be improved.

This third goes to a different perspective. If patients have the right to live, and the pharmaceutical companies need to survive too, then, the responsibilities should go to the government.

Why can’t the government spend money on the research? If this happened, it would provide the companies survival spaces, and reduce the price of the drugs.

This point of view, is good too, thinking about the balance between the patients and the pharmaceutical companies, providing a different solution.

But it still can be better.

Why?

If you look closer to these views, they have one thing in common: not comprehensive enough.

No matter which side you’re taking, the patients, the companies, the government, you are narrowing the perspective. You’re just seeing one side of the problem, not the whole thing.

This is the first mistake that we usually make: for a complicated system, viewing it from a single factor’s perspective, or attributing to a single reason, is just wrong.

Any system, the internal components are affecting each other, checking and balancing each other. You have to view it from a higher perspective, to view it holistically, then you can understand the field better.

What’s the second mistake?

We usually have this kind of thought: if a problem exists, there must be a solution, or we have to try to find a solution, otherwise, any thinking, discussion is meaningless.

And it’s not.

We have to admit, not every problem, has a “feasible” solution. Often, no solution’ is a type of solution too. It doesn’t mean, there’s no value in discussion and thinking about the problem.

On the contrary, from deep thinking, we could achieve some mutual agreement on the understanding of the problem. This is helpful to solving the problem, eventually.

Please remember these two principles.

Next, let’s think about how to deeply understand the current situation shown by the movie.

First, let’s think:

What are the elements involved in the system? Like, which person, which organization?

The simple ones are these: the pharmaceutical companies, the drug stores and the patients.

The pharmaceutical companies produces drugs, the drug stores sell those drugs for the companies, the patients go to the stores to buy drugs. This is a basic production to consumer line.

But, are these the only ones involved? Of course not. If you only see these, it’s easy to jump to the first conclusion (blame the companies) or the second one (defend the companies).

This is the most common problem: let your thoughts stays on the ‘obvious’ level.

The component should at least include the following:

• Government: making the law and policies, taking control of financial budgets, circulation of products, as well as imports and exports
• Hospitals: introducing drugs to patients
• Charitable organizations: providing free drugs
• Universities and research institutions: providing fundamental research
• Generics companies: more specifically, the original production generics, Indian generics and Chinese generics companies
• Pharmaceutical companies: research, sales and operation
• Patients: can be divided into patients who can afford the drugs and patients who can not
• Investors: investing the companies, including individual and institutions

……

The list can go on, we’ll stop here.

These nodes, based on interest, cause and effect, motivation, connect with other nodes in the complex system — thus building a model mimicing the real world.

The more you put on the list, the closer you get the real world.

This is the first step: collecting all the elements that consists the system.

Only after this step, can you say you have made sure of the basic comprehensiveness of your thoughts — in other words, only if you’re considering the checks and balances between all the elements, can you start thinking holistically, instead of a single perspective.

So you’ve found the elements, what next?

For each element, we should figure out the three essential factors:

• HAVE: What does it have, what can it provide?
• NEED: What does it need, what does it want?
• Constraint: What are the constraints?

For example, to patients, their NEED is effective medicine (coming from HAVEs of pharmaceutical or generics companies). Wealthy patients HAVE enough money, However poor patients HAVE limited money, and their CONSTRAINT might be information inefficiency: that they’re not aware of the existence of generics, etc.

For generics companies, their HAVE is both effective medicine and low quality medicine, their NEED is profit, and their CONSTRAINT is government control, transportation fees, and research ability, etc.

For pharmaceutical companies, their HAVE is medical research ability and effective medicine, their NEED is profit, and their CONSTRAINT is high expenses, time consuming researches, and high standards on producing medicine, etc.

If we go further when analyzing pharmaceutical companies: the researchers, their HAVE is medical knowledge, medical products, their NEED is research funds and sales channels; whereas for the management level, their HAVE is research funds and sales channel, the NEED is medical products. See, these two groups of people have the opposite H & N, that’s why they’re coupled together.

Let’s talk about the government. Its HAVE is political power, interest rate control, etc. Its NEED is the stableness of the society and the basic welfare of people. Its CONSTRAINT is limited financial budgets, including controlled rates (difficult to adjust), low effectiveness(given its size and delayed information), intervention (no direct control, but with policies, fund issuing), etc — These all will affect the government’s decision making.

What’s the meaning of this step? Mainly two, explained below:

1. Find all the Have and Need of all the elements (or in other words, supply and demand), we can connect these elements.
2. By thinking the Constraint of the elements, we could think more holistically, that for a particular element to participate in the entire events, how the element would face the challenges, make decisions, and overcome the resistance.

For example, for the government, we would hope it to provide more funding, then we realize the money doesn’t come free, it’s limited and controlled, not easy to be adjusted.

Note that, till this step, we haven’t used any professional knowledge yet. In other words, the analysis so far, is within out knowledge graph. We just used more standardized methods to list the components out, making it accessible to ourselves, so we can look at the big picture.

The third step, is to connect the elements using the H and N listed above, to build a chain.

If it’s not easy to connect two elements, or it just breaks, the possible reason is that the C is creating the resistance.

Thus, we need to think:

• Is there a new method, to eliminate the C?
• Is there another node, to bypass the C?
• Is there an optimization, to ease the C?

For this step, we need more information, to fill out the blank spaces of thinking.

For example, if poor people can’t afford the drugs, choosing only the second choice, which is looking for cheap generics from India, then why is this not a main solution?

After search, we could figure out, that to block counterfeit drugs, the government limits the imports of non-compliant medicine. If the government opened it up, the price would go down, but the the profits of pharmaceutical companies would be affected, and the counterfeits drugs might be all over the market.

This is the source of the CONSTRAINT of the generics companies.

Then we can think about, can we do something to ease or eliminate the C? For example, a special license for some of the generics companies?

The key here is about gaming and balancing. Every thought must be depending on these: What are the consequences? What are the influences? Can the CONSTRAINT be eased or eliminated?

Do not think about the CONSTRAINT only. Only if we do analysis of all the NEED and HAVE, we can find more optimization.

For example, the wealthy can match their own H and N, but the poor can not, they can’t afford the drugs. In the mean time, the charitable organizations, investors and wealthy people, their H are all money. Then, can we do some dynamic pricing, or some services to reduce the cost for the poor, and transfer the cost to some other platforms.

An example can be: the wealthy ones can invest in charitable organizations, to pay for the poor, to gain fame/social respect, and tax exemptions from the government.

This is an effective way, to connect all the H and N from all the elements.

The above, is just some assumptions. They provide alternatives for the problems.

Next step, is to go deeper and deeper, get more information, to support or disapprove the assumptions.

For a complicated system, you move a little, you may change the whole system. How to adjust, connect, and control every node, to achieve better efficiency of the entire system, becomes a huge challenge.

In the end, as I’ve said in other articles: frameworks and models can’t solve your problem. It can only do the following:

• Direct your thoughts
• Let you know what information to grab
• Teach you the right place to put the information

What I shared above, is a deeper, more comprehensive thinking process.

You may be noticing that, in the end, I didn’t provide any viable solution. We only got assumptions and potentials.

That’s normal. Not every problem has a strong and clear solution. If it had, it would be solved already.

However, through the process, you get to know more about the field, in the mean time, your thinking ability is being improved.

That’s the meaning of thinking.

It’s not about getting the optimized solution, it’s about understanding the world, even if just a little bit more.