Tag:

Simplicity

BlogCulture

Loosing the Forest for the Tree

by Ron Potter

You’ve seen me turn to Shane Parrish many times.  I think he is one of the best “thinkers” around today which makes him my favorite blogger.

Einstein Essentials

In this article, Shane talks about how Albert Einstein sorts the essential from the non-essential.

I can also go back to one of my favorite Aristotle quotes that I use for great teamwork: Truth, Love, Beauty, Unity.  Beauty is what Shane and Einstein are talking about here.

In Aristotle’s terms, he is talking about the simplest, most direct, most essential information.  Sorting out the essential from the non-essential is the key to great success but it’s getting harder every day.  Social media has filled our lives with more and more non-essential information.  Years ago I decided that the daily news was not about the news but about entertainment and sensationalism in an attempt to gain larger marketing numbers.  I stopped watching the evening news nearly twenty years ago because I found it irrelevant.  It was not about wisdom.  It was non-essential!

Einstein’s greatest gift

In Shanes’s observation of Einstein, he notes that a great mathematical mind was not his greatest gift.  It was not.  His greatest gift was the ability to sift the essential from the inessential, to grasp simplicity when everyone else was lost in the clutter.  Too many people today are considered experts on a particular topic and work hard at making it more complicated.  Real genius works hard at simplification.  In Einstein’s biography, it points out that it wasn’t that Einstein understood more about complicated things that made him impressive.  It was that he understood the value of simplicity.

In working with several corporate leadership teams through the years I would often observe those leaders who always wanted more information before they could or would make a decision.  My reaction was they didn’t understand the problem or issue and therefore they wanted more information in an effort to understand.  It seemed to me that the best leaders, investors, and advisors always simplified the situation to a few essentials that would make the decision clear and understandable.

We were talking with our own financial advisor recently.  It seemed to me that the market had been in a wild gyration over the last few weeks with the Dow going up and down several hundred points per day.  When I asked how they dealt with such volatility his answer was “It’s just noise.”  To him, it was non-essential information.

Filtering Skills

Shane closes his article by listing the skills to better filter and process:

  • Focus on understanding basic, timeless, general principles of the world and use them to help filter people, ideas, and projects.  The italics are mine.  The news is not timeless, it’s daily.  Timeless principles are the ones that last and ones we should be focused on.
  • Take time to think about what we’re trying to achieve and the two or three variables that will most help us get there.  Three variables lead to six options.  Four variables lead to 24 options.  The human brain can only deal with about seven options at a time.  Keep your variables to three or less.  Otherwise, the brain cannot process it.
  • Remove the inessential clutter from our lives.  This can be the things we think about, the number of balls we try to keep in the air, and even stuff.  The stuff you collect over time only creates clutter in the long run.  Sort it out.  Get rid of the inessential.
  • Think backward about what we want to avoid.  Start with the end in mind.
0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterEmail
BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Elegance: Summary

by Ron Potter

We’ve looked at three of the four sections that will help us build great teams: Truth, Respect, and now Elegance.  This week’s blog is a summary of the Elegance portion that has been written about over the last three weeks.

Elegance is made up of Simplicity, Focus, and Role Clarification.

Simplicity

Simplicity:  We all know the old adage KISS, Keep It Simple, Stupid.  I love old adages because they’re built on truth, even if they are a little rude like this one.  But the point is right on target.  Keep It Simple!  Once we start adding complexity to an issue, it becomes less elegant, more prone to mistakes, missteps, miss understandings, and missed results.  Our human brain is lazy and overloaded.  It looks for ways to simplify things so we have the capacity to understand and deal with complexity.  The more we simplify the greater chance the team has to perform together.

Focus

Books have been written about how our modern technology is not only destroying our focus but is destroying our ability to focus.  That’s scary to me.  But, like any muscle or ability, we can enhance that ability through dedication and practice.  You’re not going to be in good physical shape without regular exercise.  You’re not going to be a good reader without reading on a regular and disciplined base.  You’re not going to be focused without regular exercising of focus.

In every case, the concept is simple but the execution is difficult.

  • Go out for that walk, run, or bicycle ride on a regular basis.  Get to the gym several days per week.  Seems simple enough.  But it takes dedication and determination
  • Pick up that book rather than turn on the TV or flip through social media or complete just two more games on your phone.  Seems simple enough.  But, there we are, watching TV, finally looking up from our social media not realizing that we just spent an hour.  Time is more valuable than money.  We can always earn more money.  But, once you spend that hour, ten minutes or even ten seconds on something frivolous, it’s gone forever.  You’ll never get it back.  Focus.

Role Clarification

This one is a negative, not a positive.  While simplicity and focus are things that will greatly enhance teams, demanding that everyone stay in their “swim lane” or just do their role well and don’t worry about everyone else is a negative when it comes to great teams.  Yes, good teams rely on everyone knowing and doing their roles well but great teams tend to blend and mix thinking and perspectives in order to come up with the best solution.  Great teams function more like orchestras where the parts blend well together and are much richer and stronger in harmony they are as individuals.

Elegance

Elegance is the third leg of our team journey.  It’s an important and positive leg but is more subtle than the previous two.  When we’re not sharing the truth or showing respect, it’s obvious.  When our Elegance is slipping it is not always to see it happening right away.  Stay diligent on this one.  Look for the signs of Elegance waning.  Build an Elegant team.  It’s powerful!

0 comment
1 FacebookTwitterEmail
BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Elegance: Simplicity

by Ron Potter

Let’s continue our TREC to a great team.

You’ll recall that Aristotle defined four levels of the Pursuit of Happiness.  Level 4 is the highest level that produces the most happiness.  Aristotle’s words to describe this level were Truth, Love, Beauty, and Unity.  I’ve converted those words into Truth, Respect, Elegance, and Commitment.  I’ve made this conversion for a couple of reasons.

  1. Words like Love and Beauty are not often found in our corporate language today so I’ve converted Love to Respect and Beauty to Elegance
  2. I like to use language tricks to help you remember a concept.  TREC sounds very much like the word TREK.  The word TREK means a “long, arduous journey.”  Building a great team is a long, arduous journey.  You’re on a TREK

If you intend to start that journey of building a great team, following the concepts of TREC will help you accomplish that goal.

We’ve looked at Truth and Respect in our previous blog posts.   Our next topic is Elegance which will include the subtopics of

  • Simplicity
  • Focus
  • Role Clarification

Today we’ll start looking at Simplicity.

Simplicity

One definition of the word Elegance says “the quality of being pleasingly ingenious and simple.”

I think every team would want to be known as ingenious.  Our corporations are pushing for more innovation every day.  But I think simplicity is the more powerful and difficult of the two.  In fact, being ingenious in the simplest form is the most powerful type of innovation.

Albert Einstein said,

The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.”  He also said “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.”

Notice that with the pause right in the middle, he indicated that it would take courage.  Taking something complex and making it simple is genius at work but it takes courage.  Why?

I think one of the answers to that question is that you are a professional or expert.  Often you have earned your right to be on the team because you have become a professional or an expert at something.  Professionals and experts tend to make things more complex to prove themselves or show-off their genius.  But, back to Einstein’s quote, any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex.  Real genius happens when things are simplified, made more elegant, streamlined, easier to adjust to changes, quicker to adopt.

Part of your TREC is to come up with the simplest, most elegant solution possible.  It’s not easy and it takes courage.

The other reason I’ve seen through the years for making things more complex rather than simpler is that it’s hard to be held accountable when things are bigger and more complex.  I’ve seen “expert” after “expert” explain away why a plan or structure didn’t work because “who could have predicted something like that would happen in a system so complex?”

Make things simpler, clearer and less complex.  Might you be held more accountable?  Yes!  But high-performance teams hold themselves more accountable than anyone else will.

Simplify, simplify, simplify.  Take out the complexity.  Bring more clarity.  Be a more elegant team.  People will notice.

0 comment
1 FacebookTwitterEmail