Lets take something simple and make it complex… WHY? because it seemed like the way to go at the time.

Seriously though many simple tasks can become buried in red tape, and often its our own red tape. Now that is tragic!

I recall being asked to create a checklist of a procedure of a commonly repeated process within an organistion. It started off as about 14 steps and then quickly went to 30 - 35! Finally it got up to 60 steps in the process! ARRGH!

The point being three fold, to be able to fully explore the process undertaken, then to evaluate how to simplify it and finally to be able to track where the process was up to for a project should a staff member be absent and someone had to take over.

So what can we take from this? well simple things can be complex (often for a reason) and sometimes the complexity can reveal new ways to simplify that which was simple.

Next time you want to pull a complex thing apart, or make a simple thing complex consider setting out the aims for the project so you can focus more clearly on getting things right. There that was simple….

Stumble it!