Making it simple

We get a lot of interest and enthusiasm when we explain what it is we are doing. When we ask people to commit and together start solving an issue they have, we often get the objection that what we do is too difficult. “Why don’t you make it simple?”

Define simple. Easy, clear, elegant, clean? Stupid, dumb, slow? Where one man finds his paradise, another comes to harm! Even defining the word simple is not ‘simple’ and at the very least context dependent. Yet we all strive for our lives to be simple, always in relation to elegant and clean, but most of all easy; live the good life! People confuse simple with easy.

People always say that things where better in the old days. Life was simple when you just had to tend your land and live from the produce! Sure peasants who had to work 18/7, 365 days a year and give half of their proceeds to the robber baron who owned their land had a simple life, but it sure as hell wasn’t easy. It was especially hard during winter, disease ridden and they had a very short lifespan. Nothing romantic about it! Only a very limited number in the upper classes had it easy, the rest stole and plundered and even that isn’t as easy as it sounds.

In my experience, simple (easy) answers are always based on either 20-20 hindsight or blind faith. Whatever you think of these options, they are a clear indication that finding simple answers is not easy. Let’s take an example. Philips and Douwe Egberts (Sara Lee) put the very successful Senseo coffee machine on the market a couple of years ago. Elegant machine that provides a clean way to produce a cup of coffee that can be tailored to your taste with easy to use sachets. It’s a bit of a bother that you can produce only two cups at a time, but since we live in smaller family units, that’s not an issue in daily life; for parties we just use something else. This answer to making the coffee we like individually is simple, but do we really think it was easy to get there? Both parties had to build trust, a working relationship and contracts to start working together; can’t have been easy. They had to segment the market, come up with the right target group and they had to come up with a business model that would provide both with a healthy profit margin; can’t have been easy. They had to decide on spending millions on setting up production facilities, marketing campaigns, etc., on a product that still had to prove itself; can’t have been easy. Then they had to roll out, train and negotiate their sales channels, prepare to diversify the different taste options and keep their fingers crossed; can’t have been easy. They only succeeded in combining the resources of two companies and go through a difficult collaborative effort because they had faith in the success of their new product. Now, with 20-20 hindsight it’s a simple no-brainer, but if it was that easy, why did the other efforts Philips set up (with e.g. Nike) not work out?

Because collaboration and innovation are basically simple processes but aren’t as easy to do as we hope they are. When we need to invent something new, or solve a problem, we first need to define exactly what it is we need. Finding the exact need and solving the resulting contradictions to everybody’s satisfaction is the most difficult part of innovation; it takes collaboration. Why? Because there is no room for compromise when solving contradictions, all the while need is a perception which differs depending on context. The more people you aim to help, the more contexts your solution needs to be tailored to. That is not easy! It is best done with a multidisciplinary team, since they provide a multi context base to work from, align people and get them committed. Working with people is fun especially when it leads to something simple, but again it is not easy.

Wasn't it Einstein who said: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." I am affraid most people cross this line to make things easy. What is simple about what we do, is that we provide a path to follow. What is simple about how we do it, is that we do it together. What is simple about why we do it, is that we address a need in all of us; to want to learn and improve. The fact that it’s not always easy, is icing on the cake!

Coming back to the initial question. The question that should be asked is: “Why don’t you package the result of what you do in a simple way?” Good question! To us, what we do is simple while we know that what we want to do is not going to be easy. I think that is where the miscommunication occurs. We separate easy and simple on a conscious level, whereas most of the people we talk to do not. Simple things to us are never easy and we love a challenge. So when we talk about simple, we just don’t connect and when we talk about it not being easy we feed the resulting insecurity. This then is our biggest short term challenge. We’ll keep you posted.