Intellectuals rail against oversimplication, possibly because their livelihoods often depend on making the simple complex.
The natural tendency, at least in the workplace, is not to simplify, but to complicate. The tendrils of complication seize and encircle people and projects. Eventually, the combined weight of unnecessary complication draws down production and squelches creativity.
And there's nothing less productive than a dead organization.
It is a daily challenge to determine how much information is enough, how much bureaucracy is just right, and just where deep thought ceases to be deep and becomes too clever by half.
This takes guts. An extra study can always be ordered. We can analyze and re-analyze and add a few more experts and get some new procedural requirements to boot. Unless there is a crisis, you can rest assured that you will be ridiculed as a bumpkin if you find ways to whittle matters down to their basics. Simplification requires simple questions, such as:
- Which business are we in?
- Which activities produce the greatest results?
- Which customers provide the most business?
- Which responsibilities and customers provide the greatest hassles?
- What are the simplest explanations for our problems?
- How are we making our job more difficult?
- Have we told our customers what we do?
- Do we know what the customers want?
- Do we know what our employees do?
- Do we know what we want?
- Do they know what we want?
I've dealt with executives and managers who cannot answer those questions. In many cases, they think they know but when joined by their colleagues it becomes clear that there is not a consensus or anything close to agreement.
They spend their days on more sophisticated, nuanced, subjects.
Finding out what they are supposed to do is far too simplistic.
2 comments:
Clients occasionally present me with a situation to which the solution is obvious. I usually say something along the lines of, "You don't need my help on this, you need to do A, then B, then C. Have a nice day." I have noticed that clients look at me as though I had a second head growing out of my shoulders when I say things like this.
Edward de Bono, as ever, has it spot-on - "Dealing with complexity is an inefficient and unnecessary waste of time, attention and mental energy. There is never any justification for things being complex when they could be simple."
I know what you mean, Rowan. There can be a real tendency to resist the simple. Book stores have large shelves dedicated to diet books offering complicated alternatives to "Eat less and exercise."
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