If you’ve missed the great Yves Morieux giving his TED talk about fighting complicatedness and creating incentives for cooperation I strongly recommend you to invest 12 minutes of your time and watch the video. It’s really inspiring and mind-boggling.

Smart simplicity is about shifting power from rules, policies and metrics to real people. Empowering people to take responsibility by removing much of the rules and increase reciprocity by removing any unnecessary buffers that make business units self sufficient. Without this dysfunctional self sufficiency, business units and thereby also people must start cooperate.

This will transform the entire operating model of an organization and create a sort of organizational nervous system where everything depends on everything and no one can hide behind KPIs and organizational boundaries anymore. Are we really ready to step up and have that quantity of power AND have the responsibility that follows? If you are a business manager and shit hits the fan, it literally hits you in the face. You are responsible! Why didn’t you ask for help?

“Blame is not for failure; it is for failing to help or ask for help.”

There is however a counterforce, a wind of compliance and increased control blowing through Europe. Not only in the corporate sphere but also in the public sector. An increased number of regulations and legislation requiring new KPIs and the need for new business units responsible for benchmarking compliance. Regulation and legislation is of course necessary, but they also feed complexity and complicatedness if over-implemented. Over-implementation combined with the increasing fear of being too dependent of people are hindering organizations of reaching their full potentials. I found this quote circulating the internet for a while that really hits the spot:

“CFO asks CEO: What happens if we invest in developing our people and then they leave us?

CEO: What happens if we don’t and they stay?”

The trick is naturally to have balance. And to achieve balance, you must know your organization’s strengths and weaknesses in order to know where to focus your efforts. I haven’t heard one company NOT complain about their operating costs. How many of these companies are aware of the true root cause for their high operating costs? Why is the engagement, loyalty and satisfaction amongst employees decreasing, while top and middle managers found it the other way around? How do a huge amount of business performance metrics and rigorous business unit boundaries affect staff morale and operating efficiency?

This is where I and my peers, i.e. enterprise and business architects come in. We have the necessary skill set and tools to help you discover and visualize the root cause of your “complicatedness”. We are at your disposal…