William of Ockham, of "Ockham's Razor" fame, believed that the best explanation was the one that held the least amount of assumptions.
This makes sense on an elemental level. Why complicate things when they don't need to be? Why invent or imagine things that aren't there while arriving at a conclusion? Simple tools, like a hammer or a screwdriver, are powerful.
Take clothes for example. Let's say it's sunny out and you're headed to the beach. You take a hat with a wide brim to protect your face from the sun. Let's personalize it a bit: you adorn it with pins to express your personality. You then put a net around the brim to hang down over your face, further protecting you from the sun. Then, you want to keep cool, so you place battery-powered mini-fans onto the nets. You can see that this hat is now going to look kind of ridiculous, right? Plus, the hat would become too heavy to comfortably wear for any period of time, so the hat would have to come off, completely defeating the purpose. Why add all this extra stuff when a wide-brimmed hat itself does the job?
Like our beach hat, the most elegant theories are also those that are more simply dressed. Also, one shouldn’t confuse simple elegance with simple-mindedness. A case in point would be Einstein’s Theory of Relativity--a formula that's elegant in its mathematical simplicity, yet it's so powerful in its predictive ability.
MyOutcomes has its own version of Ockham’s Razor. With its conceptually simple Outcome Rating Scale (ORS) and Session Rating Scale (SRS), MyOutcomes brings elegant, straightforward, power into the therapeutic setting. Its simplicity of presentation--four scientifically-vetted questions on a sliding scale --belies its predictive ability. The ORS and SRS are simply-dressed tools that, with effective training and regular implementation, can help therapists simply take their practice to the top.
Click here to find out how you can bring Ockham's Razor into your practice today.
