Why Eliminate Unnecessary Complexity?

This week has turned into a mini-series about complexity, as we’ve touched on why complexity exists and how managing natural complexity results in manufactured complexity in some capacity.

Despite it sounding obvious, I made it clear that our goal is to eliminate unnecessary complexity from your organization.

However, I also noted that practically every client that I work with has unnecessary complexity surrounding their business processes and systems.

So, why is unnecessary complexity a bad thing if every organization has it? Couldn’t we simply ignore it?

The unfortunate reality is that unnecessary complexity comes with a hidden cost.

Think of this hidden cost like interest on a credit card where you’re making minimum monthly payments.

It’s there, it incrementally adds up, and when you’re faced with the need to make a big purchase, you might be out of credit.

How does this hidden cost manifest itself with your organization?

Here are a handful of ways, and I bet you’ve seen at least one of them:

• Increased onboarding time for new employees, as they need to learn how to work within your processes and systems
• Higher cognitive load as people execute processes and use systems, leading to fatigue, errors, and lower productivity
• Growing maintenance and technical debt that makes it more difficult to deliver incremental value as business processes evolve and systems are updated to align with the new reality
• Decreased agility when required as market conditions change and opportunities present themselves that cannot easily be realized
• Increased churn for people that work with and for your organization, which often occurs as a second order effect based on the points above

Provided you can influence or have control over the manufactured complexity within your organization, it’s time to drastically reduce as much of the unnecessary portions of that complexity as possible.

Tomorrow, we’ll turn our attention to techniques you can use to identify unnecessary complexity.

TLDR: Unnecessary complexity comes with hidden costs that incrementally build unless you’re actively focused on it, and those costs impact your organization in a variety of ways.