The Smart Simplicity Approach
A co-worker just shared a powerful TED talk, “Yves Morieux: As work gets more complex, 6 rules to simplify”. Yves discusses how our current pillars of organization are obsolete and he shares their solution…
The Smart Simplicity Approach:
- Understand what our people do
- This requires regular interaction.
- Reinforce integrators
- Have the power and interest to ensure others cooperate.
- Increase total quantity of power
- Empower everybody to use their judgement, their intelligence.
- Extend the shadow of the future
- Tie people to consequences of their actions.
- e.g. In order to achieve low warranty costs, car designers should be responsible for the warranty process.
- e.g. Developers also do customer support.
- Increase reciprocity
- Remove the buffers that make us self-sufficient. Remove dysfunctional self-sufficiency.
- Reward those who cooperate. Penalize those who do not.
- From Lego: Blame is not for failure. Blame is for failing to help or ask for help.
“You start looking at the interplay of employees.”
“The real battle is not against competitors, it is with ourselves!”
I tried to connect his recommendations to my current workplace. We didn’t do so well. How about your group?
Yves talks about the importance of minimizing “complexification” and encouraging collaboration. While I have heard some discussion towards encouraging cooperation, I feel that the actions are pushing even harder against it. I feel barriers to communication and collaboration. We battle the complexity of a code base that was created by cowboy coders. We battle the complexity of additional meetings in order to make decisions and transfer knowledge. In order to achieve what we want, it feels like we need to add even more processes. I once heard that the only way to solve a complex problem is to remove things; complexity cannot be solved by adding.
I encourage you to ponder what he discusses and see how it feels to you. Some of it may make you feel uncomfortable at first, but if you look past your comfort zone, does it make sense to you?
While I had difficulties seeing these points at my company, I was intimately familiar with them. I feel that all of these points are directly in-line with the values of eXtreme Programming (XP); Simplicity, Communication, Feedback, Respect, and Courage. It has had these answers since 1996, building on ideas and practices that have been around for far longer. They understood that values are fuzzy, so they created Principles to tie the Values to Practices. It is battle tested (over 17 years) and well documented. Some companies attempt to achieve continuous delivery with legacy processes. I applaud them for their tenacity.
Matt Scilipoti
matts@scilipoti.name
github.com/mattscilipoti
