Simplify

Three places to look for opportunities to remove difficulty and create a better business and an easier life.

If you can simplify something without reducing the value it offers, you can win. Win customers, profits, or free time. But how often do you stop to ask the question: Could things be simpler?

The dictionary definition of simple: “easily understood or done; presenting no difficulty”. In most businesses there are numerous opportunities to remove difficulty and thus make things more easily understood or done. To identify opportunities for simplification, try looking across the following three dimensions:

1. Customer
Examine customer interactions, experiences and journeys – such as how consumers learn about your products or services and how they progress through awareness, interest, desire and action. Can you make such experiences easier or more accessible? And could you simplify purchase or after-sales processes such as returns or customer feedback? Also question your products or services; consider how a product’s use or function could be made simpler, or how you could improve a service to make it quicker and easier.

2. Business
Can you make ‘back-end’ business tasks or processes less difficult and thus more efficient and effective? This could mean examining tasks or processes to identify steps which could be removed, shortened or improved. Or you could use technology to make things quicker and easier, for example, by automating data backups or other administrative processes. Opportunities to simplify could exist anywhere in the back-end of your business, from the way you develop and produce products or services to the way you communicate with colleagues or suppliers, or administer your finances, IT systems or payroll. Look everywhere.

3. Personal
You could choose to start more simply by looking at yourself. How could you make your own working life simpler? Look at what you do and challenge the things that present difficulty, those things which are not so easily understood or done. Numerous opportunities might emerge, from training yourself to better understand complex tasks, to simplifying how you organise your days, to more straightforward improvements such as simplifying the way you manage your inbox or meetings. It’s these small opportunities to simplify that can add up to make all the difference. In every case it’s about first identifying points of difficulty and then conjuring up ways to make things simpler and easier.

Protect value

Protecting value is fundamental to successful simplification. If part of a product, service, task or process provides value and you remove, shorten, or mess with it in some way that reduces value, you are not simplifying – you are making things worse. It’s similar to clever cost-cutting, which seeks to cut only those costs which offer no customer or business value, but here we aim to save not just money but time and stress levels.

In essence, simplification is about asking one simple question: Could things be made simpler, without diluting value?

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