In a world that loves complexity I find I am personally and professionally appreciating simplicity. As I work with clients and corporations one thing is evident. The most profitable clients both personally and professionally understand the value of simplicity. They know what they do, they understand why they do it and they are careful to protect the simplicity and forthrightness of which they do it…whether its leadership, management, or product development.
Often the most difficult discipline for each of us is focusing on the simplicity of specific action.
Many homemakers (that would be me) struggle with families who have not been trained and rewarded for doing simple things daily. Over time, the lack of teaching and engaging personal discipline creates an impossible situation on cleaning the home. However with simple, daily actions, the tasks are reduced to minutes a day with maybe an hour focused time every seven to ten days.
Offices often ignore receipts, paperwork, accounting until tax time, when a simple log to each professionals phone, calendar, or ledger would make quick work monthly or even weekly, reducing stress at taxtime.
“The discipline of repeating basic actions as the experience of effort does its magic, assists one to engage in excellence through the processes of uncluttered intent .~SMB”
I so often see individuals, owners and entrepreneurs trying to “be all for all” which in my humble opinion is almost an exact recipe for disaster. I am personally willing to pay for specific services, I do not need bells and whistles, but I often need THAT service handled consistently, preferably with kindness in customer care. However, often the services I engage, without planning or strategy, keep interjecting changes, upgrades, or additional services that so pollute why I hired that service, I often go elsewhere. Bigger and more complex isn’t always better.
Profitability comes into play when businesses and individuals keep first things first. As a strategist I use the following questions with clients. Simple, yet very revealing when we are developing new processes and prototypes:
- What are we/I trying to do?
- What is the point of doing it?
- Why is this needed?
- When would we like to engage the experience?
- How will that help us/help them/support success?
- Where would this happen? Can I do this or will I need additional help?
- What would the emotional/visual tone be when I/we do it?
- How would this make our client/family/customer feel?
- Will we be happy doing it repetitively? Is it possible to be on-going or a special experience?
- Is it affirming of who I am, we are, or our business brand?
- Are we willing to do this well? Do we have the necessary scope and sequence of the true requirements?
- Does it pass the good judgement test?
Whether its about getting my personal health and fitness in order or whether or not I should sell one of the businesses I’ve built, these twelve questions keep me personally on the first things first mode. If adding to the concept, complexity, or expansion is to be considered it has to go through the same rigors again. Too often something is added for the ego needs of the individual or company without proper consideration of the true time and life impact, which of course affects life prosperity too!
The first 31 days of this year I have made two choices:
1) I substituted rice and almond flour for our usual wheat flour for 6 of 7 days of the week. I did not mention this to my family. Result: less allergy responses for our teens, less weight for me. I lost 17 lbs and they had fewer days on asthma medications. We did not have allergies to flour, but apparently it is an irritant.
2) Each day we each took 5 items out of our closet, shelves, or cars. Result: The house is looking better, the children are more easily finding their items before they are buried, and we were able to give away 3 bags of clothes to a local charity.
In business I made two additional choices:
1) New clients would go through a specific pre-qualification checklist before engagement of a new service or strategy. The result has been to recognize that without those items present in their business, they are unprepared to profit from our services and we then created a preparatory service to support their true need. Developing this process has benefitted my clients as they know have the same staff they trust preparing their skill sets as they learn new steps to success. Saturday School became one of our most popular items in January.
2) My writing time would be protected, I am a ghost writer for 6-10 books per year, and while I had always protected my writing time for contractual work, I had been lax about leaving the phone on during that time. One change, phone put on answering machine only has made my writing output 27% more effective in the first 30 days. Small step, huge payoff.
Simple choices. Not all out war on big deal activities that wouldn’t last. We made it simple, there was room for pardon when we couldn’t keep up. Surprisingly though, every person in the household got excited when the task was so simple…and simple got the job done….with results.
Could you be creating complexity when simplicity would do?
