Steps 3 and 4 of Elon’s Algorithm, Applied to LEGO’s Turnaround. With the Questions You Should Be Asking This Week. Elon calls Step 3 “honestly the least interesting.” Optimization is what everyone defaults to. The Algorithm exists to force Steps 1 and 2 first. That’s where 80% of the value lives. After LEGO deleted half its brick types, something unexpected happened. The product got better. Fewer pieces forced designers to get creative with combinations. Sets became more elegant. Kids could mix sets together because parts were actually interchangeable. The constraint made the toy more fun. Same logic Musk used choosing stainless steel over carbon fiber for Starship. Cheaper, easier to weld, gains strength in cold temperatures. “We can weld stainless steel in a tent.” They literally built rockets in a parking lot. The simplification didn’t just save money. It removed the infrastructure that was slowing them down. No clean room. No autoclave. No specialty tooling. Speed came from what they no longer needed. Then came speed. Knudstorp told his board LEGO was on a burning platform. “We’re running out of cash and likely won’t survive.” That gave every person in the building permission to skip the committee, kill the review cycle, and act. Elon’s version of Step 4 starts with a question, not a motivational speech. Set a deadline that seems impossible. Then ask: what is physically preventing us from hitting it? The answer is your bottleneck. Remove it. Ask again. He uses the SR-71 Blackbird to make the point. The plane had almost no defense except acceleration. Thousands of missiles were fired at it. None hit. But the SR-71 only works because every ounce of drag was already gone. Speed without simplification just scales the wreckage. LEGO cut product development from two years to one. Not just effort. They had fewer things to develop, fewer pieces to tool, fewer decisions to make. The simplification from Step 3 removed the bottleneck for Step 4. During the 2008 financial crisis, LEGO grew while competitors shrank. One warning. Acceleration is the last step for a reason. Speed amplifies whatever you already have. If you haven’t deleted and simplified first, you’re scaling the mess. The questions for Steps 3 and 4: What two things does your team do separately that are actually the same decision made twice? If you had six months of cash, what would you do this week that you’re planning over the next year? What is physically preventing you from moving faster? Not politically. Physically. LEGO didn’t build a second factory. They removed everything slowing down the first one.