When Simplicity Becomes Your North Star

There is beauty in simplicity, I think most would agree. People may marvel at intricate technology or take joy in working on complex problems, but there are moments when?complexity stops being interesting and starts to become a barrier to progress. There are too many moving parts that must be accounted for, and what should be nimble and robust becomes bogged down and rigid.?

With constant advances in technology — including, of course, the seemingly endless array of ways we can implement A.I. in our business practices and operations — it’s easy to fall into the trap of over-complexity. There are myriad best of breed systems, multiple apps for processes large and small, and incomprehensible amounts of data. Taken together, they remind us that the investment business is quickly becoming a tech business — and the transition isn’t always smooth.??

At AIMCo, we manage hundreds of billions of dollars of hard-earned pension money, an inherently complex task. However, without deliberate attention, these complexities can accumulate and compound, leading us to sometimes find ourselves operating a “Rube Goldberg Machine” of an asset management firm.?

A?Rube Goldberg Machine is a?contraption that is intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and elaborate way. A series of simple, unrelated devices are connected in such a way to cause a chain reaction — with the action of the first device triggering the initiation of the next. Eventually the entirety of these actions will allow for the completion of a simple task, like turning off a lightbulb. Excess complexity can therefore be measured as “rubeosity,” a logarithmic measure (of course!) of the excess complexity of a product or system, or its “Rube Goldberg-ness.”?

At AIMCo, we’ve recently embarked on a business transformation that aims to de-rubify AIMCo; that is, to fundamentally change our business with simplicity as the guiding star. In that spirit, we are evaluating everything from our internal business processes to our approach to client service and, yes, our tech stack to ensure they all align as simply as possible to our strategy. We’ve designed a “North Star” cheat sheet?to demonstrate simple prioritization choices to help us all stay on the right track.??

Using codified trade-offs like, “best for the company even over best for your team,” “configuration even over easy implementation,” and “automation over legacy processes and roles" will take the inconsistency and guess-work out of decision-making, and empower our employees to make choices that simplify our business. This will also give us the added benefit of improving our work experience.

It is early days in our simplification journey, and we are well-aware of the hiccups and rabbit holes of complexity that await us along the way. But our North Star will continue to pull us back from the brink of rubeosity.??

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