We’ve got to go through it…
A council IT Director said the following to me recently when describing their organisation’s transformation work across key service areas:
“It’s super complex stuff that needs to be simplified. And I love that stuff.”
This is always music to my ears. Seeing people recognising the role of simplicity in digital transformation.
To recap on this topic, one of the most important things teams have to learn is that simplicity is an approach to working with complexity. It’s like in the story We’re Going on a Bear Hunt …We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. We’ve got to go through it!
I’ve got my own principles for simplicity – they’re ways of getting into and through complexity. Not removing, or even accepting it at face value. But working with it.
This is also the primary work of service design, which I’ve summarised before as the importance of frameworks and first principles.
In leadership, the principles of simplicity extend to focus.
This means ensuring teams are clear on immediate priorities. So that everyone knows what to focus on, and more importantly, what to ignore.
It’s communicating a clear vision and direction, ensuring the right measures of success are put in place. And it’s simplifying governance and permissions so that others can act without escalation and focus on what matters.
The approaches described here all help teams to make progress within complex service and policy spaces.
It’s work that can feel like stripping back the wallpaper from previous occupants – decisions, solutions, and reasoning behind historical projects and programmes. All layered one on top of the other. Careful approaches are needed to understand and question underlying assumptions, step by step.
I love this stuff as well. It can feel like magic when teams learn to simplify. It’s where we need groups with diverse skills and perspectives – giving them ways to make progress together through reconfiguring organisation design, capabilities, processes, and governance.
In summary, again: “Complexity in the work. Simplicity in how we approach the work.”
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.