Complicators and Simplifiers

Managers can change processes in one of two ways: they can simplify them or they can complicate them. And they can do each of these things in two ways as well: smart and dumb.

dumb simplifying: where something is simplified but the manager doesn't know why it was complicated in the first place. Remember:
If you don't know why something is complicated then you may need to study it more before deciding to simplify it.

Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

~Robert Frost

Example:

Suppose you have a set of offices where you employee a lawyer, a doctor and a dentist. Sometimes one has more work than they can deal with, while another may be twiddling their thumbs. Brilliant idea: why not combine their roles so that when a client comes in they can just see who is available. No waste time. Great. well, there would be increased time required for training, plus there would be a drop in the level of expertise and a greater likelihood that something important would slip through the cracks but hey look at the idle time that is no longer being wasted! So much simpler than having three separate kinds of jobs

...Yeah, I know this would never happen in real life, but managers who don't really understand what staff do may at times decide to combine functions into a single job type without realising the complexities of what their staff do.

dumb complicating: where something is made more complicated than it has to be.

In some cases this may be a matter of building a process that is designed to explicitly cope with every imaginable set of circumstances even the unlikeliest one, rather than a process that deals with what happens most of the time, while allowing for exception handling. In former case, the process is supposed to deal with everything without having to trust the judgement of employees, but as a result it is complex, rigid and hard to change and undermines employee initiative. Plus we pay the additional costs involved in a complex process for every case we process even the simplest one. In the latter case, the process may be easier to modify and trust is shown in employees' use of their own discretion. In some cases, dumb complicating loses sight of why a process exists in the first place and so the manager concerned may design it to conform to some abstract ideal rather than what reality demands.

Remember Murphy's Corollary: It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.

So rather than trying to design a foolproof process, trust the judgement of your employees.

smart simplifying - where the complexities don't serve any useful role in the process. To simplify something in a smart way you have to understand the purpose of the process and to see how each part of the process contributes (or not as the case may be) to that purpose. It is slicing through the Gordian knot of complexity rather than trying to unravel it one snarl at a time.

Example

a flowchart could be used to map every aspect of a given process, showing every decision point and running over several pages, looking like a big flat plate of spaghetti. Or it could be simplified to show the usual flow of the process with notes explaining what happens when there is an exception. The former is unusable and remains unused, so it was effectively a waste of time developing it. While the latter doesn't comprehensively describe the process, it does give an overview of each of the major steps required and makes it clear what the typical flow is. And once a person understands the typical flow they are better placed to understand deviations from that flow.

 However remember:

Things should be made as simple as possible but no simpler.
~ Albert Einstein

smart complicating: where a process is made more complicated because of differences that actually do make a difference.

Example:

The type and dosage of medication may depend on a number of different factors: age, bodyweight, other medications a person is taking, allergies and other conditions. Taking all these factors into account when prescribing is smart complicating since it could be a matter of life and death.

The smart complicator recognises when differences matter enough to require specialised attention.

There is a sense in which these approaches group into pairs of opposites:

smart simplifying vs dumb complicating

smart complicating vs dumb simplifying

The hard thing is working out which you are doing and the only way to find that out is to study the process an understand its purpose and whether simplifying or complicating (in the right way) will better achieve its purpose.

If you don't properly understand it can mean that there may be no reason for the process at all, but it may also mean that you need to keep your hands off of it until you have a better handle on it. 

This can be a hard lesson for some managers to learn: some always try and complicate things, others may always try to simplify them even when it causes problems. There may be a tendency to think that doing something is better than doing nothing, even if you're doing the wrong thing.

Don't give in to this tendency!

Careful thought is a form of action too, and it may save the need for remedial action later.