How to better define your design problems — or why Thanos didn’t double resources
By: Ashim D Silva
Tags: Avengers, Life Lessons, Process, Design, Culture

How to better define your design problems — or why Thanos didn’t double resources

Avengers: Infinity War features a powerful super villain: Thanos. The central plot follows him on his quest to kill half the population of the universe. He isn’t doing this for evil reasons though, his stated goal is to “restore balance” to the universe. Thanos sees overpopulation as a threat and believes the solution is to kill half of all creatures so the other half can live better on the available resources.

This brings up an important question: if he’s all powerful, why not grow more food and double the resources instead?

When we face a design problem, we often spend most of our time going from problem to solution. But could we be ignoring better options because we haven’t defined our problem well in the first place?

A solution too early could interfere with how you think about your problem

Thanos first considered his own home: Titan. He saw Titan struggle to provide for its populace and blamed overpopulation. He proposed to his government that the solution was in killing half of their people. This was rejected as genocide and not acted upon. As he predicted though, the planet did suffer and his civilisation collapsed. That led him to conclude that his solution was the only way forward.

Left: Titan, now entirely destroyed Right: Thanos’ vision of a more perfect Titan

Since Thanos was already convinced that he had a great solution, he interpreted the results only from his perspective. Although there is no evidence that a smaller population would fare better, he is now certain his solution is perfect and applicable to the entire universe.

This is often referred to as a confirmation bias. The reasons for the collapse may have been more complex than “overpopulation”. His solution may not have worked as well as he’d hoped. But since the end result was just as he expected, it confirmed his world view. He was now even more convinced that killing half of everyone was the right thing to do.

Thanos has a solution looking for a problem. His stated goal was to “restore balance”, but because his solution only involves killing, he starts to define his problem as “too many people”. From here, his attention is on how to kill people efficiently.

Limitations of building a partial solution

When a problem has been defined by a solution, rather than the other way around, it can limit its effectiveness. The solution may not be holistic, but since the problem was rewritten to fit, it seems perfect. We’re moving to production half-baked leading to a limited scope of work. The team we build and the processes we develop, will now only answer the poorly defined problem.

In Thanos’ case, he has moved his focus to destroying entire populations. He has hired staff based on ability to kill. He has invested in a warship. The only task he is prepped to handle, is killing populations. Each new planet he visits could have individual concerns, implementation could be localised, but all he has is a killing machine.

“To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.” —Abraham Maslow

As an example, let’s take Earth: killing 3.6 billion people would take us back to our population in 1972. That gives us only 50 years before we’re right back to where we are now. Without additional support systems and planning, nothing has truly been improved. Thanos built none of this infrastructure to aid the remaining populace. Because his process only involved reducing the population, sustaining the rest is outside his scope of work and he built nothing toward that end.

Poorly defined KPIs can kill your strategy

An important thing to note here is his metric for success—his Key Performance Indicators. The only one he has set for himself is to kill half the creatures—half of all the creatures. So animals as a food source, those that help pollination, or assist in cultivation, are killed as well. Both creatures populations generating resources and those consuming them are cut in half. He is reducing the very resources people are meant to survive on.

This seems counter to his stated goal of “restoring balance”. If you have an unbalanced scale and halve both sides, the scale remains unbalanced.