Complexity vs. Simplicity. Making what’s difficult look easy. Too much complexity and your company will be spending too much time dealing with internal matters rather than serving its customers. Too little complexity and your company will face a tough competitive situation as everyone can copy what you do. So how do companies make what’s truly complicated look simple and accessible in the eyes of their customers? The answer is simple, but perhaps much more difficult to execute. Simply put you constantly fight complexity by asking a few simple questions.
- Is what I am doing something customers really want to pay for?
- If yes will they pay what I need them to pay?
- If no can I simplify the product and make it more appealing to the customer?
- Are your support functions actually providing the support you need?
- If yes how do actually measure it i.e. perhaps you have just accepted them as a necessary evil?
- If no how can you transform them into something that will support your business?
The first set of questions addresses what your frontline is doing and the second set what your back office functions are doing. Essentially if any of your answers are no it means you have non-value added complexity in your company. Especially the second set is tricky because many companies don’t expect their back office functions to deliver value so they don’t make a connection between what adds value and the support needed to deliver it. In fact your back office functions should be the ones that ask the first set of questions to the frontline in order to be able to answer yes to the second set of questions.
I have previously written about business partnering (Why We Need Business Partnering Transformation, The Skills Of A Finance Business Partner & What HR Can Learn From Finance), but this is taking the concept of business partnering one step further by suggesting that what your back office functions should really be doing is fighting complexity. The more simplistic they can help make your company from an internal, but also external perspective the lower cost base you will have. It will also increase the likelihood of you making products that are actually in demand by the customers. It will help increase the focus of your company tremendously and that’s where the real value is in a world where almost anyone can copy what you do and even large companies with a long history can end up like Kodak overnight.
I therefore ask if your company employs any complexity fighters and if not are you at least asking your frontline teams the right questions?