Go where the money is - focus effort on the most likely or high-value targets.
Named for Willie Sutton, who denied ever saying it. As a clinical heuristic it means test for the likely thing first, and it is Occam's razor applied to diagnostic sequencing.
In practice
- A patient arriving breathless in their sixties gets the cardiac workup before the rare metabolic screen, because that is where the answers are.
- An engineer debugging a failed deployment checks the change made an hour ago before auditing the framework, and is right four times in five.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- Razors, rules and the tools of careful thought