Simplicity: how we lose it and how to get it back
TL;DR What does it? What creates organizational complexity? We propose four causes: confusion, bureaucracy, politics and complacency. Leadership is mostly an act of effectively pushing back on these.
In our decades of consulting experience, we’ve never had to make a case for simplicity. Every client wants it. Heads immediately nod, rapport is created, hope is kindled. Why then is simplicity so hard to create and keep?
Firstly, it is clear that complexity increases with scale – the larger the organization, the more complex it is. So far, so unavoidable – quantity has a quality all of its own. But, we’ve all seen evidence that organizations create extra complexity, beyond what can be expected by size. After all, organizations of same size have vastly different levels of complexity.
Furthermore, while I am sure that complexity can be created out of ignorance, lack of care and inattentiveness, it is much more interesting to think why reasonable, well-intentioned people end up in a situation where complexity is manufactured and sustained. Indeed, what does it?
There are at least four good seductive reasons that put us on the path towards complexity. They are seductive because they are actually reasonable, well-intentioned and, well, human. They can and do happen to us all. Here’s what does it:
1. Keeping your options open. Customers love options (rather, they think they do), and they have very different preferences. Across cultures, geographies and subgroups preferences change. Your managers and leaders have different ideas about what your competitive advantage is and how to keep it. Reams of customer data and surveys indicate heterogeneity.
Your winning strategy is to do everything (will you say no to $ on the street?). Almost every company succumbs to this siren call, and while growth companies can avoid it for a while by deliberately using the “focus” strategy, scale soon puts an end to that. Big company strategies are often a mishmash of compromises and tepid commitments because the strategy is actually “continue doing what is making money” – and that means “continue doing many things”.
Relatedly, there is simply a lot of noise – fast moving trends, fashions, what’s hot and what’s not…. There are too many analysts/investors, board members, highly paid advisors who are not shy with their perspective. Opinions are free and warm the giver. Faced with a mass of conflicting data it is hard to pick the right path and commit. To wade through it all would require a sabbatical level of investment, something most executives can’t do (and vaguely hope their head of strategy can and does).
The end result of such unwillingness and inability to commit is a strategy that may well have been written by a PR department for a political campaign. Nice ring to it, verbose oratory, does not say much. A strategy that leaves almost everything open. And, that approach creates confusion – paralysis, doubt and misalignment that are the rot at the core of many failed enterprises. It is devoid of the very fact strategy is meant to provide – a sense of direction.
2. Avoiding mistakes. No one likes mistakes. But organizations truly hate them. They might mean scrutiny, lawyers, lawsuits, awkward explanations for management and funds spent on PR. The purpose of bureaucracy is to prevent mistakes and blame (not create value). This is the origin story of most arcane Kafkaesque rules. Behind every such rule you’ll find scar tissue of a mistake, sometimes from long ago – a mistake that may not be that likely anymore, or even that impactful – but better safe than sorry.
What makes (some) sense in isolation, when compounded over years becomes a stranglehold. Hundreds of arcane rules, some hard-coded into IT systems, protecting the organization from ghosts of past mistakes. Cost of dismantling them is high – fight against the system for no glory and a slim chance to be blamed in perpetuity. Better safe than sorry indeed – so red tape stays, and bureaucracy wins. The feeling of “nothing can get done around here” becomes a descriptor of your culture.
3. Keeping your team happy. Few people like conflict and difficult conversations. Pushing back on others, seeking truth – it is hard and uncomfortable, thankless work. It is no accident that disagreeableness and even some lack of social grace are celebrated in the start-up world.
Most people, however, are social first – they protect their friends, allies, their ingroup. There are loyalties to consider, favors made and expected – the whole wide world of “I scratch your back if you scratch mine”. This is not wrong per se - after all, what we call teamwork are the more presentable sides of this dynamic. Where things get tricky is when it prevents us from having real conversations, when we hide what we believe and know, when we do not look where and when we should – in short, when loyalties prevent us from doing our job as well as we could. This, we call politics (and tell our kids they’ll understand when they get older).
4. Blindly repeating what worked. You’ve achieved some measure of success – and there is scale and funding to prove it. Your strategy worked, products were successful, customers happy – you’ve found the winning formula. Now all you have to do is keep to it.
Unfortunately, such victories rarely hold. Your context shifts, customer preferences change, the recipe is copied by your competitors – whatever the reason, your secret sauce loses its magic. Only, now you are not close to customers, and all of the previous dynamic make it harder to be nimble, have difficult conversations and make hard choices – much easier to assume you just need to try harder. Perhaps you don’t have the right talent. It is easy to find fault with execution, and not the plan. Once everything is wrong except the original approach you are deep in complacency.
I hope you notice how common these four traits are. Perhaps you’ve done all of them at some point today. I did. Repeated as acts of leadership, they manufacture complexity. An organization without a sense of direction, hampered by arcane bureaucratic rules, obsessively avoiding the hard difficult conversations and not even noticing the many warning lights blinking. While all things eventually ossify, some organizations die in their youth.
Briefly, what helps?
§ Make bold and clear strategic choices – face your uncertainties and dilemmas head-on, commit and make choices that actually offer a direction; manage trade-offs, clarify priorities, define scope. A strategy that is used as a day-to-day decision tool across the organization. By keeping the main thing the main thing you buy alignment and give your team autonomy they crave.
§ Accept some level of risk and failure. No plan is perfect, no rule always works, no strategy is flawless. Sometimes it is cheaper to allow a certain level of mistakes to happen and fix them afterwards then to try and prevent them. Will Guidara of Eleven Madison Park restaurant instituted a policy of greeting guests in advance by scanning their online presence so they can be identified on sight. Wonderful – but occasionally wrong - hello Alice becomes “I am not Alice”. This is the cost of a much more welcoming system, and the cost Will was happy to bear. Furthermore, such a mistake created an opportunity for grace in fixing it elegantly and well.
§ Put excellence before comfort. Your team wants to do excellent work. If they don’t, you do have a talent issue. Excellence requires obsessiveness, practice and feedback. Your leadership needs to separate loyalty and teamwork from directness – without addressing the real issues in a forthright manner excellence is impossible. If that’s your culture, guess what – you are just LARPing teamwork too.
§ Triangulate. Face your ignorance, treat your questions as genuine questions – stay close to the value chain. Use your product. Speak to customers. Know your stuff. Organizations are seductive in making leaders focus mostly internally – and that seductiveness is dangerous.
It takes nothing short of a sustained and heroic leadership effort to reclaim and keep simplicity. Each of the mistakes listed above are seductive and likely occasionally wise to do. But the cumulative effect of many such slippages is a disastrous rise in complexity.
This is a theory of complexity borne out of our advisory work, but it is far from a final word. What do you think does it? And, what might be the cure?