The Fundamentals Problem
By Dr. Troy Hiduke Campbell
Chief Scientist at On Your Feet
The Idea
The Fundamentals Problem states that today we struggle with advanced and modern challenges because we never mastered the fundamentals.
These fundamental skills can be easy or hard to learn, but they are always relevant to tasks, and not mastering the fundamentals makes performing these new and advanced tasks much harder.
For instance, it is harder to ask an AI a good question if you never mastered asking a human a good question.
If we want to get things right today, we need to learn many (many, many, many) brand new things, but just as much, we need to learn or re-learn the fundamentals we may have never been taught, never mastered, or may have just forgotten.
Examples
Modern challenges are harder without the relevant fundamentals.
Here are some examples:
🤹 Adapting to modern changes is harder when people were never formally taught how to have an improv mindset.
🤖 AI generation is harder when people never mastered the skills of asking questions and iterating.
🧠 Low attention spans are harder to design for when people never learned the core theories of psychology.
🗽 Cultural competency today is harder to achieve when people never learned how to precisely identify culture.
💡 Innovation and solutions are harder to find when people were never taught how to clearly define a problem.
🔍 Internet research with AI modifications is harder to do well when people never mastered determining source credibility.
📣 Leading teams that are often more diverse and remote is harder when people never mastered empathetic listening.
📜 Micro-storytelling is harder to do when people never learned, with precision, the fundamental elements of story structure.
📊 Using data dashboards is harder to do when people never mastered the basics of statistical fluency.
👩🏻💻 Virtual meetings are harder to run when people never truly mastered meeting facilitation.
Why People Lack Fundamentals
People lack fundamental skills due to forgetting, never learning, and false mastery.
As you can see from the list above, some of these fundamental skills, such as formulating a question and defining problem statements, were widely taught but have been forgotten.
When people re-learn these fundamental skills, they often respond, “I forgot I learned this in high school!”
But, many more fundamental skills, such as understanding psychology, storytelling, improvisation, and iteration, have existed for decades but have never widely and properly been taught.
When people learn these fundamental skills, they often respond, “Why was I never taught this?!”
Additionally lots of these skills are skills many people think they have mastered (meeting facilitation, data fluency, empathetic listening), but they often have not.
When people re-engage with these fundamental skills, they often respond, “Oh, I didn’t know how much there was to know!”
A Solution: The 50-50 Rule
When training people for modern or advanced challenges, first focus 50% of the time on relevant fundamentals and then 50% on new or advanced content.
Specifically, you should focus fifty percent on the fundamentals relevant to the core topics of things like question-asking, creativity, meetings, storytelling, belonging, and psychology.
And, then, only then, should you spend the rest of the time on the truly new or advanced parts of these topics, such as asking AI questions, AI iteration, virtual meeting tricks, modern micro storytelling forms, unique distributed complications to belonging, and the lower attention spans of modern minds.
This approach is in part inspired by how, when I was at Walt Disney Imagineering, we would consistently have half-days to hone the fundamental skills of creativity, curiosity, communication, and collaboration, independent of our work assignments and learning new technology.
It is also similar to how athletes work on the fundamentals every day to keep them sharp and not forget them.
Some Science
We are biased to not see the Fundamentals Problem due to our recency bias, availability bias, and categorization bias.
People tend to be most influenced by the most recent and available information, so when new technology, ideas, and challenges dominate the media and conversation, they also can bias our decision making as we focus on the new.
Further, people have a categorization bias that follows the (often incorrect) logic that things in one category should always go with (be solved by) things in the same or similar category.
For instance, humans tend to believe that big challenges are solved by big solutions or aggressive problems should be solved with aggressive actions (“fight fire with fire”). But, sometimes, big challenges can be solved with small solutions and aggressive problems can be solved with kindness.
In sum, new challenges can be solved by older or even more timeless fundamentals; our bias just prevents us from seeing this.
Personal Conclusion
I have seen how the Fundamentals Problem exists among the brightest minds and within the most advanced organizations in the world.
My argument for the Fundamentals Problem first began years ago, after extensive experience as a consultant and educator for Nike, Google, Blizzard, Netflix, Apple, P&G, and many start-ups.
Everywhere, I kept finding smart, talented, and innovative people who were missing or forgetting fundamentals, and who were experiencing more troubles because of it.
The approach is also further influenced by my personal experience combatting the Fundamentals Problem in academia as a behavioral scientist at Duke University and a business professor at the University of Oregon.
Even in these great institutions of learning, many classes overlooked and under nurtured fundamental skills at the undergraduate and, especially, at the graduate level.
As a scientists and innovator, I continue to be obsessed with new ideas and skills, but as a consultant and educator, I have come to believe a fundamental problem of our modern era is the missing fundamentals.
If we want to solve the new, we must also deeply remember and nurture fundamental ideas and skills.
Dr. Troy Hiduke Campbell is the chief scientist at On Your Feet, an influential behavioral science researcher, former Walt Disney Imagineer, and Oregon business professor.
At Hiduke House, he hosts the podcast Original & Powerful Ideas and writes about many different ideas in science, business, and art.
At On Your Feet he designs and delivers ideation workshops and skills training workshops on widely useful fundamental skills, including many from behavioral science, storytelling, and design.
