It's complicated

You can often hear people saying that their project, process or product is so complex. But actually, in many cases, they aren’t complex. They are complicated. Unnecessarily overcomplicated.

And unnecessarily overcomplicated things kill productivity, kill morale and kill trust.

So, nobody likes complicated things. We don’t design stuff to be complicated. And since they can’t become so by themselves, we have to accept that we make them complicated.

Let’s admit together: We made our project, process or product complicated.

If we look at the original customer problem our project, process or product intended to solve in most cases they are crystal clear. Both the problem and our solution can be phrased in a single, easy to understand sentence (without the typical buzzwords, of course). How did we turn that crystal clear thing into this monster?

And more importantly: Why?

If you can honestly answer that question, you can get great insight into your organization. To really understand how things are going in your organization you have to methodically unfold the layers of this onion (or ogre). The 5 Whys method is a great exercise for this, but you have to be careful: when the layers become stinky it often transforms into a finger-pointing exercise. It is so easy to say that we wanted to do everything the right way, but the management, the other team, the technology limitations forced us to create this ugly creature. Things were decided above our head. (“Everyone is an idiot, only I am a helicopter.”)

But is that the last layer, the core, the root cause? Or, if we rip off the band aid, we acknowledge that nobody stood up and said loud that this is not good. Nobody fought to keep things simple to make both our lives simple and our customers happy. (Even though that “fight” is often just an email or a Slack message.)

(yet another) Why? Because that’s how we do things. We ignore things, because it is so easy to say that’s not my job, not my problem, I’m not paid for that. But the fact is we are in the same boat where we all should paddle together and in one direction. We own this product, this process, this project, no one else does.

It’s easy to recognize this behavior in an organization with new joiners, when they keep asking “why don’t we” questions. And when people give them the “that’s how we always do” answers looking at their shoes signaling that they know somewhere inside that this is not right, or shrugging their shoulders signaling that they don’t even care anymore.

This is culture.