5 Techniques to Identify Unnecessary Complexity

Happy Friday!

We’re going to end this mini-series about complexity on a high note, which is to say that we’re going to explore the ways you can identify unnecessary complexity with the hope that you’ll act on what you find.

Here are the preceding three posts in the series:

1. Why Does Complexity Exist?
2. How Managing Natural Complexity Results in Manufactured Complexity
3. Why Eliminate Unnecessary Complexity?

We’ve established that:

• The choices you make on how to design and implement business processes and systems results in complexity
• The goal is to have as little unnecessary complexity as possible
• Complexity comes with a hidden cost that impacts your business directly and indirectly

Here a handful techniques you can find unnecessary complexity:

1. 4-minute explanation
2. Process flow review
3. Origin story
4. Newcomer or outsider perspective
5. Neighbor’s grass comparison

Let’s explore each of these in the context of how you would describe a business process or how a system has been implemented.

4-minute explanation
Set a timer for 4 minutes and start explaining the various steps in a business process or what a system is supposed to do. If you can’t do it in 4 minutes, give yourself another shot and see what you can trim without losing the core content.

Consistently going longer than 4 minutes is a solid flag that you’re in territory that has high complexity, which likely includes unnecessary bits.

If you’re doing this live, encourage folks to hold their questions until after you’ve finished. As for their questions or comments, that leads directly into our next technique.

Process flow review
As you walk through a process flow, which could either be steps in a business process, or how data and logic are applied within systems, ask a bunch of questions.

My favorites are using the 5Ws or recursively asking the same question like “why”, as both of these help develop an understanding and can expose areas of complexity that lack justification.

Origin story
This often results from asking one of the “why” questions like “why are we doing it this way”, and you’ll either find the answer or be left wondering. The latter occurs if you don’t have centralized documentation or the person that has the answer is long gone.

Not knowing the origin story does not mean that something is overly complex, instead it’s another flag to indicate that the current state might not need to be the future state.

Newcomer or outsider perspective
When new employees or advisors are exposed to what you’re currently doing, there’s typically a mix of absorbing and questioning. Experienced hires and advisors often have a perspective based on learning more, and it’s worth asking to hear their perception.

There might be direct guidance on how to reduce complexity, or there will be a comparative statement made based on other organizations where they have experience, which leads into the final technique.

Neighbor’s grass comparison
The grass is not always greener, although you can at least ask or look at what your neighbors are doing with their grass to understand if yours needs attention.

A lot of organizations stay siloed in their own industry when asking others how they’re approaching a similar problem, although I would encourage you to expand this question to other industries if you’re interested in getting a wider perspective to assess your relative complexity.

TLDR: There are a variety of ways to identify unnecessary complexity and ideally you’re using multiple techniques as you’re reviewing your business processes and systems.

P.S. Why 4 minutes for the explanation?

Three reasons (only the first two are good):

1. It forces you to be concise and precise in how you explain something, which is a skill that is worth developing to communicate with various stakeholders, including those at the executive level
2. Your audience will lose the narrative if you go longer based on the shrinking attention spans of your peers, which means you space to deliver a compelling monologue that is packed with substance
3. Madonna released a song with JT and Timbaland in the late 2000s where one of the lyrics was “we only got four minutes to save the world”, which is a bit hyperbolic, but relevant if you’re considering how the hidden costs of unnecessary complexity can paralyze an organization