<aside> 🤔 Spend more than a few years in a corporation of decent size and you’ll undoubtedly come across a simplification initiative. Spend more years, and you’ll for sure see it come around again - sometimes in the form of a “transformation initiative”. Or as I like to think of it - Wax Removal, brought to you by the people that created Wax. A key reason that simplification initiatives don’t succeed is they are either superficial (low impact / on the surface) or the metric is bad (high quantity, lacking purpose). In the end, the resulting reduction in complexity is not felt by the customer. And a few years and many more features later, we start again…
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As humans, we have a tendency to overcomplicate things. This is especially true when it comes to the systems we build over time. Whether it's a business process or a piece of software, we add layer upon layer of complexity until the system becomes unwieldy and difficult to manage. In this thought-post, we will explore a counterintuitive approach to simplifying complex systems: removing something we think is really important until removing it shows that we could do without it. 💡
Before we start removing important components of complex systems, it's important to have a clear goal in mind. What exactly are we trying to achieve with this simplification? Are we trying to reduce costs, improve efficiency, or make the system more usable or scalable? Once we have a clear goal in mind, we can start evaluating the different components of the system to determine which ones are truly necessary. 🎯
In every complex system, there are certain components that are considered "sacred cows." These are the components that are deemed absolutely essential to the system's success, even if they add significant complexity. It's important to identify these sacred cows and question whether they are truly necessary. For example, a business process may have a step that is considered critical, but upon closer examination, it may turn out that this step is redundant and can be eliminated. ✂️
Once we have identified the sacred cows, we can start testing the system without them. This can be a scary process, as it may feel like we are removing something essential. However, it's important to keep our goal in mind and be willing to take risks. In some cases, we may find that removing the sacred cows has little impact on the system's functionality. In other cases, we may discover that the system actually works better without them. And in yet other cases - and this one is especially intriguing - we may discover that removing the “sacred cows” opens the door to simplifying even further! 🐮
<aside> 🔑 In Part 2, I look at how Tesla removed the Key to the car and how radical that must have been to design.
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