Simplification should be easier...

The tongue in cheek but wonderful way that Gartner are describing what is needed for simplification to become a high priority goal is the creation of a new role the ‘Chief Simplification Officer’ (CSO).

Don’t groan, as I said it is somewhat tongue in cheek.

This new role the CSO will have three henchmen to help with the greatest task that any large, legacy organisation has, the Application Undertaker, the Value Interrogator, and the Project Assassin. I love this idea. At last the process of simplification sees leaders going Basketball inspired ‘full-court press’ to find a resolution for this perennial and impactful issue.

As we seek every way possible to land a transformed way of delivering for citizens a set of accurate, efficient, human-centred and future-focused services the art (maybe even the magic) of simplification has to be at the centre of what we do next.

One outcome of allowing all the flowers to bloom as an innovation strategy is that organisations land themselves with a level of complexity that needs to then be resolved. The business case for simplification is that it becomes the ‘only’ way to grow and scale with any kind of speed. The issue to guard against though is episodic simplification, where a business case is created to go after the transformation or modernisation focused on certain areas that once done are then left alone.

What we need to go after is the holistic and continuous change cycle of simplification, setting this as the new normal for organisations like mine is key to truly becoming a digital first organisation.

Let us have a look at how we could define those ‘henchmen’ of the CSO to really build our ways of working for a future state:

Application Undertaker – For me this role is multi-faceted. Not only does it do what it says on the tin, the retiring of old applications, it also has a focus to find the application being made for new things and where they are not simple by design, repeatable, reusable and composable then it ‘retires’ the application for this new thing and works with our business to refine the ask to be based in simplicity.

Value Interrogator – Responsible for truly getting under the hood of what is the point of delivering this role allows simplification to be so closely linked to value that they become the same thing. Once that is achieved it won’t be digital and transformation championing the art of simplification it will be every part of our business.

Project Assassin – Ninja ready, able to dive into any programme board and push the boundaries so hard that we at last really do start to create a process to stop some things. Big (and old) organisations really struggle to stop things, sometimes for good reason but ‘sunk cost’ or time elapsed is not a good reason. The Project Assassin way of thinking will allow us, maybe even force us, to stop things that are not grounded in simplicity.

What if we created a culture hacking moment? In every meeting the moment at the end where we create a final statement we ask,

Can we do this in a more simple way?

... clearly it would feel very strange for us British civil servants but imagine what the answer would be almost every time, sadly, of course we can! It feels a bit commercial to ask but what if we did, how can we win as a business and how does this thing we just agreed help us to do that, a new corner stone for an operating model or even a business strategy could be the implication of this new culture.

How did Richer Sounds enter the Guinness Book of World Records for the most sales per square meter? By offering the most simple solution to every problem! The focused on four things; customers, products, processes and assets. Once they had this obsession ingrained into the teams across their enterprise they were then able to create a way that every colleague insisted in a ratio of inputs to outcomes that forced simplification to sit at the centre of everything they considered.

Simplification has to help us get to a place where we can alter the pace of delivery relating to the four Vs of data. Remember those, when they were everywhere; volume, velocity, veracity and variety. At the heart of simplification is how do we give our colleagues who are supporting customers everyday the data they need at the right time, in the right place with the right volume and accuracy that they can be the absolute best they want to be with every person they are supporting. That’s why Richer Sounds were able to offer the most simple solutions, they focused on what the colleague needed and what the colleague knew and made that the beating heart of simplicity itself.

For us to land simplification we need to build understanding and belief through five levers. We need to understand how to pull them and what the implications are when they are pulled:

Enterprise wide clarity: Of everything! This is hard for an organisation of our size, how do we try to make sure that the whole team, and by that I do mean nearly 100,000 people, have the clarity of what we are doing. How do we enshrine the principles of simplicity into every outcome we are going after. If we pull this lever there is no going back and the consequence is once the whole organisation gets a feel for this it wont want to revert back to the old ways of considering change.

Strategy directed: That means handing over control, being obsessed with collaboration and not the human nature of ownership for comfort. Enterprise simplicity requires collective ownership, it does not allow for us to seed ownership to a subsection of the department or for us to seize the strategy delivery as our own and only our own (and I say that as a digital leader, this isn’t ours!). I want our future strategy to be a chapter in the strategy of our great business I do not want it to stand on its own. ?

Future focused: This one gets a lot of debate, to some degree because agreeing when the future is has become harder in the last 18 months! We know that we do not know what the future holds and therefore being simple into the future feels like the right way to set ourselves up to be truly ready for perpetual change. Being able to take an ‘atlas’ view of the future and therefore know where we are going and what all of the maps to get there look like will be intrinsic to our success and will facilitate a long term simple view of our north star.

Encapsulated by metrics: Measuring the creation of simplicity is hard. We can use cold hard tech-debt remediation plans and count percentages but that, I think, is what is preventing the business case for simplicity being passed. We need a width of metrics that allow us to measure both the remediation of debt, the removal of risk and the improved perception of our colleagues using our systems. Its hard but this multi-faceted view is necessary to allow focus.

Underpinned by data: And without the data to create the metrics this ship is sailing nowhere. The data needed for the metrics proposed needs to be data that is collected already, new data collection created to measure the implementation of simplicity kind of defeats the object so we need to se ourselves a job of finding proxies within the data we have for the metrics we need to collect.

If we pull all four of these levers in the right way then we facilitate our large and currently complex operations teams in changing how they are known, they can move from a cost-to-do operations to a place where value is created, the value zone of what we do. Once there they are able to release four forms of value, new efficiencies, increased effectiveness, increases in business integrity and a new agility that allows us to be cheaper and faster to adopt change. At this point that enterprise strategy becomes ‘easy’ to implement and faster to results.

That business strategy stets a new theme as we see the ubiquitous mentioning of AI land in the simplification agenda. All new Tech from now needs to do two things from the 'dawn' of AI. It must simplify what we have and it must be additive to global GDP. That last one may feel odd but it perhaps is the best way of measuring simplicity in many ways and gives the measure a global stage of importance.

Our AI driven capability needs to differentiate us, but the definition of differentiation has changed, it is now about the promotion of our responsibility to citizens and customers, it has to be about removing friction, it has to be about scaling the simplification of the current state to make us better for the future. Simplifying often ‘brittle’ processes is hard and yet is entirely necessary. This is the only way to get to full capacity of what we have now, and the use of the newest tools being given to organisations like ours now opens a door to do this in human-centred and focused ways that make it so exciting to see into our simple future.

The Customer Experience is the most important receiver of the benefits of complexity removal.

Leaning into the removal of complexity requires a methodical activity, an activity that we make a conscious decision to go after and one that will see us set up for any and all futures.

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With thanks to Dave Aron from Gartner for the inspirational conversation that got me thinking in this direction and to Owen Pengelly for the introduction. And to Arvind Krishna IBM leader for additional ‘moments’ during his THINK keynote in Boston in May 2024. With a special thanks to Adam Gale at the KLAS global conference too who also pushed the simplify, simplify, simplify message in June 2024. When this appears to be the theme of the summer I am excited to see what we can do and how we can get there.

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