Making Improvements: Can Simple Really Work?

Simple Tools...

Simple Tools...

One of our mantras is “keep it simple“, because we work in an area that is complicated enough to begin with!

When we look at how businesses can improve, it inevitably means having to maintain the big picture (where are we heading?) together with digging into the details (as they can often be the blockers). To drive simplicity through what we do, we evolved a very simple set of tools & reports, which we use to run projects.

Why simple, when we’re trying to analyse and solve complex problems?

Well, our philosophy is to keep the tools simple, and get the people to deal with the complexity. Systemise the routine and humanise the exceptions. No matter how complex the day to day work and analysis, if you have to boil things down to a paragraph summary each week or month, you need to do some thinking, prioritisation and qualification.

One of the “modern problems” that we see at the root of a lot of problems is trying to move everything on at once.

Everything is high priority and urgent. But that doesn’t make sense.

Simple tools expose just this sort of paradox, because there is no complexity to magic up spurious justifications and logic, no fluff in which to hide bad news (or good news).

Simplicity promotes straight questions and answers if it’s used well. It’s also pretty scary sometimes. Ever watched a politician try to answer a question that can only really be answered “yes” or “no”…!?

Now, the reality is that you can make any problem as simple or as complex as you like; the secret of success is perhaps to take the complexity to an appropriate level, and always keep the big picture in mind. It’s also the tricky bit, requiring skill, judgement and information.

So What?

Indeed. I find that the good old “so what?” question helps you to pull back your viewpoint a step at a time until you can see the consequences of details right up at the 100,000 feet view. (If you are in a fraught environment and don’t want to be quite so brusque, a variation is “and that is good because…?”). This can help you relate detail and big picture, and work out whether something needs to be escalated or communicated in a summary report.

A useful exercise to undertake soon might be to look at how you report and manage progress with projects or long term improvements. Figure out how you can make routine reporting simpler (big picture), and exception reporting more accurate (details); without over-simplifying and losing control.

Work out for your situation where “simple” helps, and where it doesn’t. You can do an awful lot with a hammer and a screwdriver; but it would take ages to chop down a tree…