“How does a part of the world leave the world? How can wetness leave water?” asked Rumi almost 900 years ago.
Can you remove the complex from complexity? “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” said Leonardo Da Vinci.
Why is it that we have a problem being clear and simple? Does clarity lie at the heart of successful companies? Game changing inventions are often simple in retrospect.
Paradoxically, simple is harder than complex. It’s easy to be convoluted and long winded. More difficult to come right to the point. ‘Clear and simple’ is a rare earth precious commodity, mined by both saints and demagogues.
“It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions. It's not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential,” said Steve Jobs.
Banking on profitable simplicity
Imagine two banks, one devoted to simplicity and the other burdened by confusing complexity. Mimosa Bank strives to keep things simple and clear, while Oak Bank lacks an awareness of what customers really want.
Mimosa starts design thinking on an innovative new loan product immediately, led by the CEO, working with a small group of smart managers. Oak has endless meetings, pondering a schedule that may take years, led by a committee of 20 incompatible bureaucrats.
Oak Bank has one prime goal in the next 12 months in three defined customer segments. Mimosa hopes for the best, trying to be everything, to all customers who walk through the door. Oak Bank’s CEO takes pride in her managers’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
Mimosa’s boss prays that the current artificial intelligence fad will provide ‘magic bullet’ instant answers to deep rooted structural problems.
Managers like their organisations, define themselves in their speaking. Jargon abounds, with this strange desire to sound fancy. Words like, for example – transformation, strategic, inclusion, paradigm, enhancement, empowerment, innovation and resilience have distinct meanings but are very often sprinkled on ‘willy nilly’ in a desperate desire to sound good.
Usually, the result is a contribution to more foggy thinking, with no one having the courage to ask the speaker what they are really trying to say.
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough," said Albert Einstein. It’s often suggested that the most evocative words in the Bible’s New Testament are: “Jesus wept.”
Complexity can’t just be wished away.
Large systems and organisations are by nature complex, but each year new [often unanticipated] business problems continue to pop up, for instance, — radical shift in American foreign policy, overturning standard practice of the last 80 years, constant stream of new technologies and regulations, to name a few — have conspired to add layer upon layer of complexity to corporate structures and management.
To avoid frustration and inefficiency, there is a need to systematically attack the root causes of costly complexity. Design matters, one can just look at an organisation chart with all sorts boxes, and dotted reporting lines, and know this mean trouble.
Simple solution is usually the best
Help comes in the form of a heuristic, a rule of thumb from a 14th century philosopher, William of Ockham. Occam's Razor suggests that when faced with multiple explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest one is usually the best. This insight encourages focusing on the most straightforward solution, avoiding unnecessary complexity. [It’s called a razor as it cut’s through a problem.]
Complexity like the human genome is there for reason. Human cells are composed of about 3 billion base pairs organised into 23 pairs of chromosomes. It would be disaster to cut out or discount the value of organisational DNA just because its multifaceted.
But one approach is useful, keep taking away, remove processes, ways of doing things that don’t add any tangible value. That are not that organisational equivalent of a crucial ‘chromosome like’ pair. Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away” wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
