What could be simpler?

Apparently, on the whole, the answer is "your business". According to the Global Simplicity Index by Collinson and Jay who studied 200 of the Fortune 500, companies were wasting on average 10.2% of EBITDA through bad complexity.

The problem many organisations that have been around for any length of time is, simply, that they been around for a while; they have grown up. And as you get bigger, as you develop new functions and capabilities, as the organisational culture develops and matures, bits get bolted on, process, method and approach get developed and embedded, and the company stories and myths get fixed in the mind. And almost always, all those things come into existence for good reasons at the time - opportunities taken, risks avoided, great people celebrated.

But the model that made you successful today, is not necessarily the model that will make you successful tomorrow. Change is inevitable, but often with change comes an extra bolt on, a work around, a variation with a special extra rule, and the complexity increases. This complexity builds up and builds up and builds up, until one day something goes pop. Perhaps a new entrant (particularly a new, agile digital entrant) comes and takes a chunk of your market; perhaps internally driven change is getting slower and more expensive; perhaps just getting your core business done is astonishingly painful.

So what can you do about it? Looking outside my window, it's yet another lovely sunny spring day, and perhaps it's about to have a bit of a spring clean in your organisation. However, before you get started, you need to know that not all complexity is bad.

Done right, complexity can be your source of competitive advantage, doing difficult things that others can't. Like your smart phone, it's okay that there's complexity on the inside, as long as you, the user can get it to do what you need easily and quickly and when you need it. But if the complexity on the inside is not well designed, the people that write the software that runs on your smart phone will struggle to write good apps, or won't bother in the first place, and you'll be a poorer customer. And that's exactly what's happening inside your organisation - the processes, people and connections that are too difficult are either getting in the way or are getting ignored, and neither of those are likely to be good.

So what should you do?

Simply, take a bit of time out. Take some time to think about your organisation and how it works. Take some time to talk to the people on the ground who are trying to serve your customers or consumers each day. Ask them what gets in their way, and then go and ask the people who put those things in the way why it needs to be that way. And use your judgement. Many processes, standards, policies, approaches, "best" practices, ways of working, even ways of thinking, can be achieved without building barriers to the delivery of your end-organisational goals, even those things that are connected to "hard" requirements like regulation and law. There are almost always other ways of achieving any goal that takes away the "work" for the people on the front line, in the middle office, and even in the back office, and lets them get on with doing great work for their customers, whether that's "real" customers, or internal customers and partners up and down the value chain.

The problems you face are probably not unknown in your organisation - go and have a look around and see if you can get rid of some of that unnecessary clutter.

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Want to know more - take a look at some complexity myths debunked by my colleague, Hans Houmes.