Summary
- An elegant move in chess does more than solve the immediate problem, it creates multiple advantages at once.
- The same idea applies in business and marketing. The best solution does more than one job simultaneously.
- An elegant solution combines simplicity, efficiency, and effectiveness.
- Simple means no unnecessary complexity.
- Efficient means minimal waste, cost, and side effects.
- Effective means it actually produces results.
- These three qualities exist on a spectrum and must be balanced.
- Some tactics work short term but become inefficient or less effective over time.
- Other approaches feel ineffective at first but become highly efficient and powerful long term.
- Most frustration comes from solutions that are only simple, only efficient, or only effective.
- The goal is to design a solution that balances all three at once.
- Modern marketing requires more thoughtful, integrated strategies because old tactics no longer work the same way.
- An elegant solution is harder to create, but it delivers lasting advantage and clarity.
If you’re familiar with the game of chess, you might be familiar with the term “an elegant move.” This is a move that happens during a game when the move that you should be making might seem obvious. The opponent is creating an attack on you, and there seems to be an obvious move to counter this attack. Yet the player finds a brilliant move that accomplishes more than just deflecting the attack. It creates a tactical advantage. It creates a strategic positional advantage. It counters the attack, it creates a counterattack. An elegant move is a chess move that does several things at once, and there is no move better than that move. All right?
This is the same in business. In business, when we have a problem, for example, let’s say our problem that we’re trying to solve is new patient acquisition for a dental practice. There are a lot of solutions we could take. There are a lot of different paths to solving this. Yet the elegant solution is one that is arguably the best because it will integrate many different properties, particularly three core properties, into the solution that the other solutions don’t have.
This is why we care about figuring out what an elegant solution is. An elegant solution. So let’s look at why you should care. These are the properties of an elegant solution, what it has, and imagine owning these properties.
The elegant solution has simplicity. Simplicity is at the core of an elegant solution. If you have an elegant solution, that means you’re not doing things more complicated than it needs to be. It’s as simple as can be while also meeting the other two criteria.
The other is efficient. If your solution is creating a ton of waste, if it’s very costly, or if it’s creating side effects that you don’t want, then we don’t call it efficient. So it has to balance these two. And finally, effective. I don’t care how simple it is. I don’t care how efficient it is. If it’s not getting the result that we want, then it’s not a solution at all.
An elegant solution blends all three factors and all three properties into what we would consider an elegant solution. These are all on a spectrum. You might think effective sounds binary. It’s either effective or it’s not. But you could look at it across a time horizon.
Let’s look at Google Ads. In a short-term time horizon, it’s very effective. You can see results within weeks. You pay money, you get results, you get new patients. It’s a very effective solution.
Now, if you look at permission assets, it’s going to be very ineffective at first. At first, you do all these things, you make videos, you write blog posts, and you’re going to get no results. But over time, this effectiveness becomes very big. And if you look at the efficiency of it, Google Ads are pretty wasteful. You have to pay a lot regularly. But a permission asset, later as you go, becomes very efficient.
These things are all on a spectrum. What we’re looking for is where all of these become viable. Simplicity at its purest is going to be too simple. It’s going to have all the elements of simplicity, but it’s not going to be complex enough to be efficient or complex enough to be effective.
If you have something that’s very effective, it’s not going to be simple enough to be efficient or inefficient enough to be effective. And something that’s effective is not going to be inefficient enough to become efficient and ineffective enough to become simple. I hope that’s making sense, because it really is about balancing all three.
If you just have one, you’re going to lose out on one of the others. Having all three in balance is essential for your practice. Think about what it would be like to have something that’s very complicated, very inefficient, or very ineffective. At each level, it becomes very frustrating to own.
So we’re looking for an elegant solution. What is that? I hope you can see the value of it. Let’s look into how that’s created.
The elegant solution now is pretty complex. All these simple solutions and simple approaches that we’ve tried that have worked, and that audiences have gotten numb to, mean that we have to elevate the complexity of how we approach the situation. The things that used to be efficient are becoming inefficient now. So we have to think about how we can balance simplicity or complexity to create more efficiency in a world where the original things that we used to do are becoming more inefficient.
And effectiveness, as I said, people are getting numb, so things are getting less effective. How do we create a solution that becomes more effective?
To answer this, it’s not a simple answer. This is the basis of the problem we were trying to solve when we created our strategy course. It’s in the link in the description below. It goes through creating an elegant solution just for your practice. It walks you through everything we need to do with the proper amount of complexity, the best efficiency, and the most effective methods of marketing that exist in our modern times.
If you’re looking for an elegant solution, check out the course below. Thanks.