Michael Schrage describes how Tesco, a UK retailer, measures the potential benefits of any new idea. The idea must:

• Be good for customers
• Save the company money
• Make things simpler for staff

Congratulations to Tesco for “getting” the importance of simplicity and making it a top requirement for innovation. Most organizations are perpetually on a path of increasing complexity. Day-to-day operations and new products and services create the need for work-arounds that slow productivity. Support for old products and services often create more work than they’re worth.

Mr. Schrage believes training departments contribute to complexity:

Precisely because people know there’s an organizational training department, they don’t take extra efforts to take out the complications and complexities of their innovation. In the same way Hollywood productions say “We’ll fix it in post (production)” to compensate for a bad shot or bad acting, internal innovators and change champions shrug and say, “They’ll fix it in training and orientation.” Training’s very existence is used as an excuse not to further simplify. What’s more, the training department is happy to go along with the clunky complexity because that makes them more important. Training can argue, correctly, that nobody could effectively use the innovation if they hadn’t been fully trained. Instead of addressing the simplicity/complexity challenge, training effectively perpetuates it.

According to Michael Schrage, training departments help generate complexity since it drives the need for more training. (RN)

A Simpler Way to Make It Simple | Harvard Busienss Review | Michael Schrage | 1 September 2010

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