Scalability and Elegant Simplicity

On a recent pod­cast, my good friend Brad Giles and I got into a dis­cus­sion about the impor­tance of sim­plic­i­ty when it comes to scalability.

We all know the ben­e­fits of sim­plic­i­ty. Whether it’s a soft­ware pro­gram, a map to a des­ti­na­tion, or instruc­tions about how to build a piece of fur­ni­ture for your kid’s room. When things are designed and pre­sent­ed sim­ply, it’s a lot eas­i­er to pro­duce what’s expect­ed the first time.

But it’s very chal­leng­ing to make things sim­ple because busi­ness­es, by their nature, are very com­plex. There’s so much going on — from dif­fer­ent cus­tomers with unique needs to employ­ees with dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tems. Nev­er mind the vari­abil­i­ties that may exist in the world.

In a busi­ness where you might have hun­dreds of peo­ple doing their own ver­sions of assem­bly (metaphor­i­cal­ly), clear instruc­tions and process­es mean you elim­i­nate the pos­si­bil­i­ty of inter­pre­ta­tion, errors and headaches. The end result being an increased con­sis­ten­cy of results.

Good for the com­pa­ny and less frus­tra­tion for the per­son doing the work.

Two Key Ingredients

That said, sim­plic­i­ty that enables scal­a­bil­i­ty isn’t easy to achieve and requires two ingre­di­ents: mas­tery of a skill and time. With­out both, you’ll tend to over-design and/​or overcomplicate.

We’ve all had expe­ri­ences watch­ing some­one mas­ter­ful who makes their skill look incred­i­bly easy. Walk­ing a tightrope, return­ing a blis­ter­ing ten­nis serve to the cor­ner of the court, or mak­ing the per­fect omelette.

When it comes to time, I think of a quote by French math­e­mati­cian, physi­cist, inven­tor, and writer, Blaise Pascal:

“I have made this (let­ter) longer than usu­al because I have not had time to make it shorter.”

To write a very suc­cinct, three-sen­tence email is much hard­er than writ­ing three para­graphs. Thought­ful edit­ing takes time.

Lead­ers who are excel­lent com­mu­ni­ca­tors can clear­ly and quick­ly make their point ver­sus oth­ers who ram­ble in cir­cles. While they may be ener­getic and enter­tain­ing, you have no idea what their point is.

And when boil­ing down a company’s vision in a strate­gic plan­ning ses­sion, you can, of course, come up with every­thing in 20 or 30 min­utes. How­ev­er, writ­ing a vision that is sim­ple, tan­gi­ble and authen­tic takes hours, days or months.

When we are so busy doing the work, we don’t take the time to edit and refine and to cre­ate that ele­gant sim­plic­i­ty. Ele­gance in any­thing is incred­i­bly sim­ple – but it takes mas­tery, time and edit­ing. Sim­ple, crit­i­cal ingre­di­ents and steps are required if you want to scale.

You may think you are too busy to take the time to edit and refine some­thing to a lev­el of ele­gant sim­plic­i­ty but if you want to achieve scal­a­bil­i­ty, it’s well worth the investment.

The Chal­lenge

• What’s one impor­tant thing in your busi­ness that you would you love to sim­pli­fy – and ide­al­ly make dra­mat­i­cal­ly eas­i­er for you or your customers?
• Which mas­ter (or mas­ters) could you ask to help you to sim­pli­fy this piece of busi­ness and how much time do you think you have?