Lucidity begins when we know the essence of things.

If you had a knife small enough to cut a grain of ordinary table salt, you would, after repeated cutting, eventually come to a point where you are no longer cutting salt. Your last cut of salt would yield one piece of sodium and one piece of chlorine (NaCl). Any further cutting is no longer an analysis of salt, rather an analysis of the elements of salt.

Salt is not the calcium or manganese we find when mining salt nor is it the iodine that is often added. Salt is sodium and chlorine. Nothing more. Nothing less. This is what we mean by essence - the indispensable quality, nature, or substance of something, concrete or abstract.

In business, where we often deal in the abstract, it can be difficult to identify essential elements. For example, what is our mission? What is our vision? What need is this software really addressing? What is the problem we are solving for? We have trouble isolating cause from symptom, style from substance, embellishment from structure, essential from extraneous - salt from calcium.

Identifying the essential elements is the foundation of true understanding and true understanding is the basis of clear thinking. Some have little patience for these philosophical conversations, but there is great benefit in them. It provides a foundation for unambiguous analysis, elegant solutions, and uncluttered thinking (lucidity).

There are several techniques to do this - “Five Whys,” SIPOC, process flows, sentence diagramming, user interviews, limiting a description to 3-5 words, etc. Finding essence takes time, but with a little practice you can develop a new skill (and your own techniques) that bring big rewards.

Bonus Tip: You can deconstruct to a point that has no practical value. One way to prevent this is to recognize when your deconstruction yields nothing distinguishing. If your mission statement is “to make a profit,” then you may have deconstructed too far. Every business is trying to make a profit. Back up a bit.