Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Three Aspects of Simplicity

The forward-thinking leaders understand how things such as design thinking and simplicity, etc, can fundamentally change organizations and their societal impact.

The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of the business and every aspect of the organization, with the very characteristics of hyperconnectivity, interdependence, over-complexity, and fierce competition. Digital complexity comes through different aspects such as enforced rules or regulations, mixed structures, diversity, volatility, ambiguity, unpredictability, nonlinearity, and increased flux. Logically, simplifying the complicated thing is an optimal and smart choice, organizations have to sharpen the skills for managing complexity by following the “Simplicity Principles” to push the boundaries of sophisticated business mix and keep optimizing organizational structures and functions to improve business quality, effectiveness, and maturity.

Following the rule of “Less is More” for modern enterprise design: The organizational complexity has increased exponentially due to the “VUCA” (Velocity, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) business new normal; there are the multitude of complexity in the corporate scope such as information complexity, hierarchical complexity, collaboration complexity, governance complexity or ecosystem complexity. Delayering structures and de-complexity effort become an important lens through which it’s possible to examine and fix many business problems including bureaucracy, change inertia, inflexibility, incompetency, or business stagnation, etc. An organization can approach the flow zone when the positions in its hierarchy have clear and accountable tasks, ideas are shared and managed effectively, information can flow frictionlessly, and processes are streamlined to improve organizational performance seamlessly. Business management follows “less is more” principle for the organizational scheme, structure tuning, and products/services/process design for improving the business responsiveness and changeability. An organization achieves the state of digital equilibrium through optimizing its management layers, tuning business processes, building differentiated business competencies and elastic organizational capacities.

Enforcing the relationship between simplicity and clarity: There is a relationship between simplicity and clarity. Simplicity is the design of looking for what is common for maximum reuse. Simplicity is the building blocks of establishing a high mature digital organization. Simplicity is an aspect of “appropriate” abstraction. Simplicity perhaps means different things for different roles via varying angles. Simplicity means intuitive design from developers’ lens; simplicity means the delightful products or services with "easy to use" feature from customers’ perspective; simplicity also means fewer layers and high fluidity and flexibility from an organizational structure perspective, to name a few. Simplicity is a behavioral attitude to see things as and what and where they are and be content and cool as it is. But how do you know that simplicity is "just right"? How do you know you have the minimum required complexity to enforce clarity, support flexibility, and improve the intuitive design without hurting the support/maintenance costs? To achieve simplicity, you would have to address the complexities of the subject matter. It’s important to apply design thinking to decode complexity and leverage strategic thinking, systems thinking and holistic thinking to understand the big picture. Everyone is a designer to a certain degree, but master designers can grasp the essence of design philosophy and follow the "SIMPLICITY" principle to produce reliable, simplified and delightful products, services or business solutions.

Simplicity is an optimal level of sophistication and a key attribute of digital management: Take a close look at simplicity from different management lenses, simplicity is related to so many wanted digital business qualities such as robustness, availability, responsiveness, reliability, or manageability. it means less structure, fewer rules or regulations, changeability, and high maturity. Simplicity emerges synergistically from “work reduction.” But it is not in itself a goal. Indeed, continuous attention to technical excellence because every intelligence has some complexity in it; good design enhances quality and desired complexity. However, when organizations become overly complex, people get frustrated by not being able to achieve their tasks easily, they start to search for simpler concepts, methods, or practices. Logically, simplifying the complicated things, either business process or methodologies is an optimal and smart choice to make business progress. Because when things get more and more complicated, misunderstanding pops up, processes turn to be fragile, and business gaps are enlarged. In fact, the fundamental of the management discipline is to simplify things. The management should set “Simplicity” as the digital principle, really advocate clarity and transparency, apply design thinking to re-imagine the better way to do things and take a structural approach to keep consolidation, automation, modernization, integration, optimization for improving business performance, competency, speed, and maturity.

With simplicity, the goal of running a digital business is to improve business effectiveness, efficiency, and performance by removing complexities such as assumptions or dependences and adding clarity and purpose. The forward-thinking leaders understand how things such as design thinking and simplicity, etc, can fundamentally change organizations and their societal impact, first by demonstrating quick wins on delivering intuitive products and services, and then, on things such as strategy, manageability, sustainability, and social responsibility. The ultimate goal of the business either today or future is to achieve the high-performance business result and reach the high-level organizational maturity.

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