Today’s screed is about dumbing it down and how it can improve your business thinking as you grow dumb. I’m pretty sure you’re aware that I’m not an advocate for the willfully stupid among us. They might be spending too much time behind the wheel of the car in front of you to be reading this anyway. However, I do find myself trying to reduce things to their most basic elements a great deal of the time. It’s not that I don’t care about detail – sometimes there’s a lot of important stuff in there. But I find that the details tend to clutter up one’s mind when you’re trying to have a basic understanding of something – it’s like worrying about what color the room will be before you’ve figured out the square footage and the amount of paint needed so you can budget properly.
Thoreau put it best:
“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.”
Not always the easiest thing but here are some thoughts on reducing things to their basics – stripping away the clutter and dumbing them down:
- Focus on the real problem and not shiny stuff. We get too caught up in tools (social media, web analytics) and lose focus on business problems (how do I sell more stuff? How do I keep my customers happy?)
- Say “no” more often. Our brains are so desensitized to thinking carefully by the frantic, never-ending pace of our digital lives that we assume everything will take far less time than it does (or should to do well). On a similar note, try not to multi-task. Better in my book to do one thing well than 10 things badly. One after the other works better than 10 things simultaneously.
- Try and state the problem in a sentence or two. Do the same with the solution. Then hang paper on the walls you’ve just erected. When you’re hearing hugely complex problems, you need to listen more carefully than usual so you can spot the dumb parts. Example? “We need to accelerate the multi-part vehicle with sufficient alacrity so as to achieve escape velocity. Upon doing so we need to invert the structure of the vehicle to reconfigure it for travel and eventual embarkation onto target.” What do I hear? “We need to get a guy to the moon.”
Dumbing it down isn’t the same as being ignorant or dumb. It’s a way to get to the core of things. It’s putting it terms anyone, even those not immersed in the project, can understand.
Does that seem dumb?
Consult Keith 