Complexity

This hangs on the door of my office. (Please forgive the marvelous quality of my Treo camera.) It is there to remind me to keep things simple.

We almost always begin with 1+1, right? It’s the core. The mission. The clear systems that get us from “A” to “B”. Then things get complicated. We bring someone else into the project or on the team, and they’re now working on a derivation of the original mission. They realize that we need to turn “1″ into “3/3″ because it will give us better pricing. Then someone else decides that “3/3″ needs to be “(9/3) / 3. And this goes on and on until our systems are so complex and there are so many derivations that it’s difficult to remember our original purpose.

We must strive for simplicity in our systems because dissonance - when the “why” and the “what” don’t add up - typically arises from unnecessary complexity.

That’s why I keep this on my dlog. (That stands for door-log… goofy, I know.) It reminds me each morning to keep it simple.