Using the art of simplicity as a strategic tool.
By Pete Mercer
There are plenty of different ways to drive change, but it usually involves creating products or processes to be the catalyst. We rarely choose reduction in the pursuit of change, but it might be the secret weapon that your company needs.
The power of simplicity is often underestimated as a downgrade – it’s rarely considered flashy to take a minimalist approach to anything, but simplicity can be a refreshing antidote for a culture that’s addicted to life in the fast lane.
Repertoire Magazine sat down with Lisa Bodell to discuss how the power of simplification can be a catalyst for change. Bodell is the founder and CEO of FutureThink, a company that uses simple techniques to help organizations embrace change and increase their capability for innovation, and an award-winning author of Why Simple Wins and Kill the Company. She named her organization FutureThink because she wants to help people look towards the future. “We’re taught history, but we’re never taught about the future.”
Why simplicity is innovative
Simplicity is often misunderstood in the work environment. Our days are filled with busy work that eats up a significant amount of time, but does it really accomplish anything? Bodell argues that when your team has the time and space for priorities, they are much more efficient and effective with the work that actually matters.
“The first thing to know about simplicity is that it isn’t only meant to drive productivity and efficiency. That will happen, but the bigger thing about simplicity is it’s a strategic advantage because it means that people can move faster, they can focus, and they have time to think.”
It can be easy to fall into the trap of looking to innovate by adding ideas and processes to the workflow, but simplicity is really about scaling back to the essentials. Your employees need the space to shed meaningless tasks and focus on more meaningful work that will have greater impacts on things like revenue, productivity, and the bottom line.
For example, managers at pharmaceutical giant Sanofi implemented a technique called Stop It, which is an effort to remove tasks that aren’t meaningful for the company.
Bodell said, “We spend so much time having people tell us what more they’re going to do, but we never ask them what they’re going to stop doing. I like what Sanofi does – subtraction is just as important as addition, just like weeding the garden so it can grow. When they do their strategic planning, they say, ‘Give us your top five priorities that you’re going to accomplish and then tell us the top five you’re going to stop doing to make that happen.’ You can’t just keep piling on more, you have to make space for priorities.”
Kill the Company
Part of what Bodell does in her work is encourage leaders to think like their competitors to identify and confront any vulnerabilities within their own organization. This exercise is called Kill the Company, and it puts business leaders in position to look at their own companies as the competition and find ways to put themselves out of business.
“The purpose of it is proactive obsolescence,” she said. “How do you identify your weak spots and fix them before your competitors make them a problem? Because you don’t want to react to change, you want to drive it – the only way to do that is constantly look at your weaknesses with honesty and fix them.”
This process gives business leaders free reign to take an objective look at their own weaknesses in a safe and constructive environment. Bodell even likens it to a kind of business therapy session for some people, allowing them to say whatever they want. From there, it gives them an opportunity to take these “bad things” and “impossibles” and turn them into opportunities and solutions.
This exercise is designed to be performed by executive and leadership teams right before strategic planning starts, so that time can be spent prioritizing the things that need to be fixed. Bodell said, “What’s cool about it is that you discover new fixes that are actually a competitive advantage that now make you turn those strengths onto your competitors. It’s cathartic.”
Reigniting curiosity and other power skills
As artificial intelligence continues to evolve and saturate the market, it’s more important than ever for your employees to flex their skillsets, especially the power skills. Bodell has advocated for replacing the oft used (and perhaps under-appreciated) term soft skills with power skills, or as she put it in an article for Forbes, skills that “make us human.”
“AI is going to take care of a lot of automated tasks, but that’s going to free us up to be more human and we’re not used to it. We’re used to processes, but we need more ability to creatively solve problems, to innovate, to think, to be curious, to have empathy. Those are things machines can’t do yet, so we call those power skills.”
For Bodell, the greatest of these skills is curiosity. “Curiosity drives action. It hijacks your brain. If I can ask you enough questions, I can get you on my side from a sales perspective very quickly. If we teach people how to ask better questions, we’re going to get better innovations.”
Curiosity is also one of those traits that can die out if we don’t provide the right kind of kindling to keep the fire going. Leaders who are looking to reignite the curiosity of their team members need to be able to demonstrate it themselves by providing a safe space to ask open-ended questions.
Bodell also advocates for other power skills like agility, resilience, creative problem solving, and leading through change. She argues that agility often gets put in the wrong bucket as a result of misunderstanding why leaders want their teams to be agile. “You don’t want people to be agile just to respond to change. You want people to be agile so they can drive change. That’s different.”
It’s all about framework, which is why her trainers at FutureThink implement improv exercises that are popular at improv training grounds like Second City, The Groundlings, and Upright Citizens Brigade to look for a solution in the positive and the negative. One of these is called “That’s Great” and it uses scenarios where someone is confronted with bad news and has to come up with a “that’s great” kind of opportunity from the news.
“It teaches muscle memory to look for the positive and negative aspects in the problems we need to solve. There are always ways to solve problems if you have the right mindset.”