The Venn Diagram Was Built for Something Else. So Is Half the Software You Use.

I was talking with friends the other day about weighing a decision, and I suggested a pros and cons list. Then I said, "or actually, a Venn diagram would work better here."

I don't think I've drawn one in years. It just came out of my mouth, the way tools you learned early tend to. But right after I said it, a question surfaced that I have somehow never once asked: who is Venn?

I learned the name in elementary school, don't use the thing, and could still produce it on cue without ever wondering where it came from. So I looked it up, and the answer was more interesting than I expected.

Who Was John Venn, and What Was the Diagram Actually Built For?

John Venn was an English logician at Cambridge. He published the diagrams in an 1880 paper called "On the Diagrammatic and Mechanical Representation of Propositions and Reasonings."

He was not building a tool for comparing two things. He was extending George Boole's work in formal logic, and the circles were an instrument for testing whether an argument actually held up. You could load a set of premises into the diagram and see whether the conclusion followed or whether you'd fooled yourself. That was the job.

He didn't even call them Venn diagrams. He called them Eulerian circles, after Euler, who had been drawing versions of them a century earlier. An American philosopher named C.I. Lewis attached Venn's name to them in 1918, thirty-eight years later.

The Part That Actually Bothers Me

It isn't that I didn't know any of that. Plenty of useful knowledge is knowledge you don't need.

It's that I never checked. Not once, in the fifteen-odd years I've known the term. And it took four minutes. The information wasn't hidden, or technical, or expensive to get. I just never had a reason, because the thing worked. Every time I drew two circles to sort out a decision, I got what I needed. Working is a very effective reason to stop asking questions.

And I don't think I'm unusual. This is a tool that got named after a man who didn't come up with it, then repurposed into a job it wasn't designed for, and it's been operating that way in plain sight for over a century without anyone feeling the need to look into it.

We Kept the Circles and Lost the Logic

Here's the part I keep coming back to.

Venn's diagram could tell you whether your reasoning was sound. The version we all use tells you which items belong in which bucket. Those are not the same capability, and the second one is much smaller than the first.

So the repurposing wasn't free after all. It just wasn't free in a way anyone noticed. We inherited the shape of the tool and quietly gave up its function, and now essentially nobody who reaches for a Venn diagram has any idea it was ever able to do something harder.

Which is the whole thing I'm trying to get at, so let me put it plainly:

Hold onto that sentence. It describes a great deal more than a diagram.

You Are Already Paying for More Than You Use

Take the phone in your pocket, because it's the version anybody can check right now.

There are thousands of settings in it. It can watch where you are and change what it shows you. It can rewrite a phrase you type forty times a day into three characters. It can scan a document into a searchable file, run a chain of actions from one tap, and silence everything except the four people who matter after 7pm. Most of us use it to call, text, take pictures, and check a handful of apps. The same goes for the laptop it syncs with, which for most people is a browser and a place to open documents, sitting on top of an operating system full of things nobody has looked at since the day it was set up.

And here's the thing: that's completely fine. Nobody should read their phone's manual. I'll come back to why that matters.

Now put the same lens on what your business pays for, where the stakes are different.

Microsoft 365 is the place to start, because nearly everyone reading this has it.

What you're paying for is a platform. Document management with version history and retention. Workflow automation. Device management and security policy. Reporting. Scheduling. A dozen things a business would otherwise buy separately.

What most companies use is Outlook, Word, Excel, and Teams chat. Four apps out of a suite, and the four that most resemble the desktop software people already knew in 2009. The rest sits there, licensed and paid for, doing nothing, because nobody ever had a reason to find out it was there. The tool got worn down to the shape of the habits people brought with them.

QuickBooks is the same story with a smaller footprint. It's built to tell you which jobs make money, which customers cost you, and how this quarter compares to your own budget. In most of the businesses I see, it's a checkbook register that produces invoices and a year-end file for the accountant. It does that well. It was capable of answering the question the owner asks out loud in every meeting, and nobody ever asked it.

The office phone system was bought for call queues, routing, and reporting on how long people wait on hold. It makes and receives calls.

And then there's the big one. Plenty of businesses run NetSuite, or a CRM they write a real check for every month. These are purpose-built systems, properly bought, correctly named, and genuinely excellent at what they were designed to do. Then the CRM becomes a contact list with a search bar. The ERP becomes a place to generate invoices. The forecasting, the automation, the reporting that would answer the thing you currently pay someone to answer by hand every Friday, all of it was configured once during implementation for a version of the company that no longer exists, and nobody has opened it since.

That isn't a case of the wrong tool. That's the sentence from earlier, arriving with an invoice attached. A tool capable of something harder and more valuable, worn down over time into the easy job, with nobody left who remembers it could do more.

The difference between this and the Venn diagram is that you're paying for the whole thing every month regardless.

"It Works" Is Measured Against What You're Used To

This is the trap, and it's subtle.

When the reduced version of a tool sets the standard, you lose the comparison. You don't know what the full thing would feel like, because you've never held it. Your expectations got formed by the habit. So the monthly report isn't slow, that's just how long it takes to build. The four manual steps aren't overhead, they're the process. Chasing three people for approvals isn't a gap in the system, it's your Tuesday.

None of that registers as a problem. It registers as work.

That's what makes this different from a broken system. Broken systems announce themselves. An underused one performs adequately forever, and adequately is remarkably comfortable. You only find out what you gave up when something forces the comparison: a new hire who used the full version somewhere else, a growth spurt the habit can't absorb, or a competitor who isn't carrying the same drag.

There's a Name for This, and It Isn't an Insult

In the 1950s an economist named Herbert Simon put a word to what I did with the Venn diagram. His argument was that people can't actually be rational in the way economics assumed, because we never have complete information or unlimited time to think. So we don't search for the best answer. We search until we find one that's good enough, and then we stop. He called it satisficing, and the body of work it came from won him the Nobel Prize in economics in 1978.

Barry Schwartz later split people into satisficers and maximizers. A satisficer has standards, meets them, and moves on. A maximizer needs to know that no better option existed. And the research runs in the uncomfortable direction: maximizers aren't happier for the trouble.

So satisficing isn't a defect. It's the correct default, and it's most of why any of us get anything done. It's why I never looked up Venn, why you shouldn't read your phone's manual, and why nobody on your team has gone through the modules in a system that produces invoices perfectly well. Almost always, good enough is the right call. A business that tried to optimize everything would seize up inside a month.

But notice what satisficing actually is. It's a method for choosing quickly when you can't afford to evaluate everything. It was never meant to be a permanent verdict. You satisfice on a Tuesday because you have to, and then the answer you settled for just stays, quietly, for nine years, because nothing ever came along to make you revisit it.

That's the real problem. Not that you're a satisficer. That nobody ever scheduled the exception.

When It's Worth Digging

So schedule the exception, and keep it small. Nobody needs every feature they're licensed for, and plenty of the simple version is genuinely the right version.

Once a quarter, take one system you're paying for and be a maximizer about that one thing only. Ask:

• What was this built to do, and how much of that are we actually using?
• What are we doing by hand that we're already licensed to automate?
• Who set up the current configuration, and does the company still look like it did then?
• Has anyone confirmed it does what we think it does, or are we assuming?
• If it failed quietly tonight, how long before we'd notice?

The last one does more work than the other four combined. Most of what hurts a business isn't the failure, it's the delay before anyone notices.

Half the time the answer is that you're using the part you need and the rest genuinely doesn't apply. That's a legitimate outcome, and it's the satisficer being right again. The difference is that now it's a decision instead of an assumption.

So Go Look

You just spent a few minutes finding out what a Venn diagram was actually built for. You stopped satisficing about one small thing, and that knowledge will never earn you a dollar.

The same few minutes aimed at the systems your business actually runs on is a different proposition. Not because anything is broken. Because "it works" has been doing a lot of quiet load-bearing, and there's a reasonable chance you're leaving real opportunity sitting inside software you already own and already pay for.

You know the Venn diagram's real story and its real use case now. Your CRM, your ERP, your Microsoft licensing, the rest of your stack: worth making sure those are working in your favor rather than just working.

If you're not sure where yours stand, that's a conversation worth having, and it's usually a short one.

One More Thing

Before you read this, you already knew what a Venn diagram was. You'd known since you were a kid, same as me, and it never cost you a thing not to know more.

Now you also know who John Venn was. An English logician at Cambridge who, in 1880, built an instrument for testing whether an argument actually held up.

And now you know that Mr. Venn didn't even make the Venn diagram.