Evolution via Complexity (Complexity is Laziness – II)

The irony is that to overcome and leverage complexity, we often have to invent the simplest ways for our processes. Most of the time the beauty -and sometimes art, if we’re lucky- lies beneath this philosophy.

As mentioned in our previous post, “Complexity is Laziness”, organizational complicatedness has grown 35-fold while the business complexity has risen only 6-fold since 1955.

Customer Journey, which looks like a spaghetti today, isn’t helping much for easing this ‘Complicatedness’.

Time is running too fast for asking questions like, how this happened, why this happened etc.

The kind of intelligence we need today is the ability to adapt to this change and now it’s more useful labor trying to find effective ways for managing these complexities.

Tip of the Iceberg

In his excellent book “The Four”, Scott Galloway is explaining the DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. Yes, all these companies have never-seen-before ability to touch human emotions and create the need for their products and services.

But before that, they had to process enormous amounts of data and create meaning from that data to gain their positions in the market.

Around 10 to 15 years ago, when these tech giants enabled their ‘magic’ over the big data, the technological intelligence and its tools were not even close to their level of readiness as they’re at today.

They didn’t adapt to change, instead, they’ve created the change. Their ability to increase their intelligence while endlessly simplifying things gave them the power to invent ‘things’ that people love and addictively use.

So the evolution is maybe the kind of intelligence which transforms complexity into simplicity. Through out the evolution journey, it’s not an unusual observation that things often things get simpler and more intelligent. Simplifying complex things breed new solutions to problems, eventually bringing various new opportunities to our lives.

Let’s look at some examples…

The trillion dollar football & sports industry had no chance to be developed before the invention of the very first lawn mower, which presented vast flat spaces that led to nurturing of the sports culture.

Heredot mentions about oil around 500 B.C. But it was only after 1847, the Scottish Chemist, James Young redefined it’s value by distilling it. Then the oil industry and the subsidiaries was developed in the following 100 years.

Henry Ford, who’s is mostly known as the inventor of the automobile, actually had around 10 car manifacturer competitors at his time. What he really invented was, he simplified the production process and enabled the serial production of the cars and converting them from being a toy for the rich to a basic need for the masses.

(To be continued…)