Simplicity is the Key to the Success

Many organizations are going through enormous growth of their processes, structures, roles, rules, and tools. It all starts with a good intent of gaining more control over the complex and unpredictable world. Create some stability. However, it only works to a certain limit where the environment is fairly complicated, but not complex yet. And that’s the problem many organizations are facing right now. Over the past few decades, they’ve been growing all that. We need more processes, new roles, new tools. Looks good, but eventually it created a mess. It wired organizations into a stage where they are not flexible anymore, and where no change is possible in this interdependent fixed environment.

And that’s where organizational agility came into a picture and try to simplify that back to a very lean and flexible minimum. It’s similarly painful as if you’re trying to lose a weight you’ve been gaining for past decades. You don’t have the right habits. You’re eating too much. You don’t eat healthy food. You’re an exercise. Now how many times you started as a New Year’s goal all over again. I’m going to lose my weight. Sounds familiar?

Organizations are like this mid age, old man or woman. They know it’s not working. They’re trying to change. But it’s super hard for them. They have the history of bad habits hardcoded in their DNA. So how can we help them? For some there is no light that will never change. It’s similar to people – they can be ill or die early. An organizational environment we call it losing their market position and share or eventually bankrupting. For the others, the trick is in creating a sense of urgency. Which is important not just for the top management, but everybody in the company. It’s so important that we go exercise every day. Change our practices change our habits. Change our daily routines. We can take an inspiration from the Japanese culture and make Kaizen (改善) – continuous improvement through small, consistent, incremental changes made daily by everyone – part of our daily life. It will be painful, no question about that. But I believe it will pay back. The world is not going to change back. We have to change.