Simplification
A mature business is rarely something that was designed in a top down fashion to some master blueprint. Rather, in line with Galls Law, it evolved into its complex whole from smaller, less complex things. This organic evolution can create apparent complexity and so some tools are useful for cutting through all of the growth to simplify things.
What does it mean to simplify something? In Mathematics classes we would have been asked to ‘simplify this expression’ - to boil an expression down until all that was left was its essential parts, allowing us to identify how the thing before us really worked.
In Philosophy, Physics and Business we encounter the same encouragement to simplify what we are looking at by identifying the essential components. Let’s look at some different approaches to simplicity and consider how they can help.
We may assume the superiority of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses
This suggestion from Aristotle might encourage us to start with the minimum number of assumptions when solving problems.
A similar less is more approach is advocated by William of Ockham:
Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity
In this case we can look to eliminate redundant processes, systems and decision layers - one thought experiment is to ask “What would happen if we were to remove this completely? Would one of the wheels fall off our business, or could we keep going without it?”
As we noted in Spherical Cows, Physicists love simplicity, and this included Albert Einstein:
The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.
I think what Einstein is getting at here is that simplicity is actually really quite difficult. So perhaps in business we need to master our domain before rushing to simplicity, for fear of removing a component that we really did need after all.
Richard Feynman was a great communicator of some of the most complex topics in Physics and prized simplicity as a signal for the correctness of an approach:
You can always recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity
This suggests we can use good taste in our problem solving - if our solution or explanation feels clunky, then keep looking for the underlying principle.
Now, since we are looking for ways of looking at simplification in business it makes sense to check and see what business leaders have to say.
Steve Jobs, for example:
It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.
And
The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.
Shades of Feynman and Einstein there, with the idea that achieving simplicity was hard to do but worth it as a guiding principle for an entire company.
And then we have Jack Welch describing how simplicity is core to an effective organization:
For a large organization to be effective, it must be simple. For a large organization to be simple, its people must have self-confidence and intellectual self-assurance […] You can’t believe how hard it is for people to be simple, how much they fear being simple. They worry that if they’re simple, people will think they’re simpleminded. In reality, of course, it’s just the reverse. Clear, tough-minded people are the most simple.
This is a direct call to make simplicity the heart of what gets done and simplicity became part of the slogan “Speed, Simplicity and Self Confidence”.
So removing complexity (and hence increasing simplicity) was a cornerstone of early Western thought, was held to be a virtue by pioneers in Physics and set as a goal by business leaders.
But how do you do simplicity?
I look at this in some of my earlier posts (Spherical Cows Little Widgets), but I also intend to return to the practical side of simplicity in subsequent posts.