💃 Occam's Razor + Salesforce Professionals 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! You are no stranger to tools (like this and this), here at the 💃 ChaCha 🕺.

Today, you get a classic, wrapped in ChaCha, and delivered with promises of saving you time and increasing your effectiveness ❤️.

Let’s get to it ⬇️

Agenda for today includes

• Occam's Razor + Salesforce Professionals

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

Occam's Razor + Salesforce Professionals

Today we will discuss-

💃 What Is It? 🕺

💃 Why Should You Care? 🕺

💃 How Do You Get It? 🕺

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SCENARIO

“Hmmm, that is weird,” thought Adam the admin.

He was reading a ticket from Sally the salesperson, who advised that Opportunity records that should belong to Sally were incorrectly assigned to another salesperson.

Adam was recalling the automations 🤖 he knew of, that could be auto-assigning records…incorrectly?

He couldn’t think of any, so he went into the Flows and researched 🧑‍💻.

Nope. None of their Flows would do this. 🤔 

Then, he hit up Devin the developer. He asked her to look through the Apex classes for anything that could be incorrectly assigning records.

Nope. Devin researched and told Adam there was nothing like that. 🤔

Adam, perplexed, hopped on a call with Sally. He asked her to walkthrough what had happened.

“Well,” Sally said, “the records that I am expecting to be assigned to me - the prospects that I’m working with, calling, emailing, etc - are not assigned to me. Really weird, right?”

“That is so weird!” Adam replied. “So, when you assigned the records to yourself, did you notice when they were no longer assigned to you?”

“Assign to myself?” Sally asked.

🤦 

After a few back and forths, Adam realized that Sally had never assigned the records to herself. She merely “expected” to be assigned the records because they were “her prospects.”

🤦 🤦

WHAT IS IT?

Occam’s Razor is a problem solving principle.

Per Wiki- “When presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should prefer the one that requires the fewest assumptions.”

It’s intention is efficiency - to reduce the time it takes to come to a conclusion.

It does so by encouraging KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid. 🫡 

If Adam the Admin had exercised Occam’s Razor, he would have saved himself time and headache. Had he deduced to the most simple and common root cause - User Error - his day’s google search history would’ve been halved 🙂.

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

Occam’s Razor is a tool for your toolbox 🧰. A powerful one because it creates efficiency, simplifies, and can give you considerable time back in your day.

You, Salesforce professional, love all those things, right?! What are some specific Salesforce benefits?

Here are 3 reasons you should care-

1) Designing Solutions

Always go for the simplest solution. If a Flow is more effective than Apex, use a Flow. If a standard object can do the job, don’t create a custom object. If it can be done with one phone field, and not three phone fields, then use one.

Of course, you won’t have full control of design decisions, but when you do have the control - consider the simplest solution, first.

2) Troubleshooting

Not only does Occam’s Razor excel in tasks like solution design, it is equally powerful in resolving issues.

The most obvious example is….🥁🥁🥁

User error!

When you get a new ticket from a user, if your first though is “another user error!” then you are using Occam’s Razor.

It’s the most simple root cause, and the most common.

Why wouldn’t you start with user error? Take a look at your ticket resolution reports - user error probably ranks pretty high 🙂.

And if it’s not user error, then you move on to your next root cause analysis.

Perfect segue ⬇️

3) KISS, and Then…More KISS 💋 

If the simplest solution doesn’t work, don’t immediately pivot to a complex solution 🙅.

Perhaps you can tweak or modify or add to the simplest solution, to make it viable 🤔.

Or maybe a net-new solution that is also simple 🤔 🤔.

But do not 180 from simple 🤌 , to “we can write an algorithm that will take into account the waning crescent moon and the US Treasury Rates and output a dataset that we’ll stage in a custom object and then write formula fields to….” 😵‍💫 

Start with the simplest, then keep it (as) simple (as possible) 🙂.

HOW DO YOU GET IT?

Simple (but not easy) - make it a habit 🙌.

Use Occam’s Razor to frame your first question-

❓️ “What is the simplest way I can solve for this?”

❓️ “What is the simplest explanation for why this is happening?”

❓️ “Ok, the simplest explanation isn’t correct…then, what is the second most simple explanation?”

Training your mind to think in this way, through discipline, repetition, and time, will enable all the benefits of Occam’s Razor 🧠 .

Think about your role. You have the opportunity to use Occam’s Razor 10x/day, at least 🔄 !

Doesn’t having a free, simple tool to help navigate the complexities of your responsibilities sound amazing 💯 ?!

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes