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The challenge of reintegrating a nation-state’s military veteran back into its civilian workforce has persisted since the time of Caesar Augustus in Rome circa 13 BC. Therefore, it is time to innovate on this millennia-old communications problem and solve it, at least in the US, and First Principles Thinking is a time-tested problem-solving technique. The first step in applying the power of first principles thinking is to break the veteran hiring problem down into its seven fundamental elements, what Aristotle called first principles, to accurately define it. Then we can use five applicable philosophical razors to separate, i.e., shave off, our extant assumptions from the identified first principles to clear our clouded current thinking. Doing so then allows us to reassemble the first principles in a new way, creating an innovative solution to veteran hiring through first principles thinking, which we can implement, at least in the United States, using nine proven tools and techniques.

The Factory for Innovative Policy Solutions is proud to present you with the second volume of the First Principles Thinking Review. In the spring of 2020, we launched this publication with the aim of creating a space to host an international and interdisciplinary conversation about tackling societal challenges with first principles thinking. Over the past several months, a number of returning and first-time authors from different backgrounds and walks of life have contributed their thought-provoking ideas to the Review. In the following pages, you will learn about the role of first principles in the scientific method and how they shape the process from coming up with possible explanations, or hypotheses, to generating theories. Furthermore, you will see how first principles thinking can be applied to a wide array of challenges, from fighting homelessness to evaluating business opportunities. Finally, you will be granted an exclusive preview of state-of-the-art research being conducted on FPT.

This review article provides a brief summary and analysis of First Principles by Thomas E. Ricks, in which the author explores how classical philosophy and first principles thinking influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. The review also highlights how the author’s own political thinking draws on first principles and concludes by summarizing some of the strengths and shortcomings of his recent work.

This article presents the first principles thinking process as a collaborative effort undertaken by three problem-solvers from the Factory for Innovative Policy Solutions. In response to the challenge of improving living conditions in the Jan Luykenlaan neighbourhood of The Hague in the Netherlands, the team demonstrates how individually generated ideas can be synthesised in order to produce original approaches to achieving a common goal.

Does the language we use to talk about peace prevent peace? Defining peace in terms of conflict and violence seems to restrict peace-related activities to matters requiring negotiation, conflict resolution and violence prevention, and to evoke delimited emotional responses. I sense that new ideas about peace could only come from a systematic, first principles approach to a topic that is accepted as a social good but rarely examined this way. Perhaps such an exercise would strip back the concept to reveal the root experiences, behaviors and emotions we point to when we say, ‘this is peace’. I hope that by identifying the first principles of peace it might generate creative ideas to enable a new perception of peace, beyond the absence of violence, and that could be used to effectively promote peace.