By WALE AKINYEMI

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My very first car was a beaten up Volkswagen Beetle. It previously belonged to my uncle and he had literally abandoned it. It was the most difficult car to drive. It required very special skills to maneuver.

First it was a manual transmission, so you had to know the correct gear sequence - especially for reverse. It was just too complicated as were a lot of machines produced in that era.

Today the story is different. The cars of this era are hundreds of times more complex than the old ones. They have more powerful engines, easier to drive, have automatic transmission, sensors to let you know when you are too close to any object and have rear view cameras.

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But the interesting thing is that these features are not for the high-end models, they are standard features of most cars today. The move from complexity to simplicity has made a big difference.

The first time I worked with a personal computer it was so complicated. Just to get in after switching it on was a series of commands. If you wanted to work on a document there were programmes like WordPerfect. There was no drop down menu, you needed to memorise the commands for each action you required.

Now when you were working with WordPerfect and you needed to work on a spreadsheet or you needed to introduce graphics, it was a different ball game. You had to save the document (which required you knowing the command for saving a document) and you had to exit WordPerfect - which also required you knowing the exit command.

Breakthrough technology

All these may sound like Greek to many people reading this but trust me, this was the reality of an age and this represented breakthrough technology of that age. What characterised them was the complexity it took to operate them.

Today it is different.

You can be working on a word document, have an excel sheet, WhatsApp chat, Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) opened, all at the same time and you still work effectively and efficiently. What characterises the innovation of today is the simplicity.

Just like the cars and the computers, the more sophisticated and complex a system is, the easier it is to operate. So, the mark of sophistication today is simplicity. Now this should flow into leadership and culture.

For this reason, even in the customer experience indexes, ease of access is one of the top features. To crack today’s market and to effectively lead and inspire your teams, there must be a deliberate shift from complexity to simplicity.

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In the book, Business At The Speed of Thought, Bill Gates talked of a digital nervous system in companies. He meant that the time between when a problem happens and the news getting to where it can be fixed, is key in measuring the communication flow in an organisation.

I once worked with an organisation where the staff were demotivated because some of their requests were not being granted. You can imagine how it looked, when we discovered our demands were already provided for in the company policy document. But, no one read it. Who do we blame here?

Are there not more simple ways to communicate the same things? I have seen companies put their policies in short videos or cartoons and write scripts for them.

Finally, there are those who keep complex things complex. There are those who keep simple things simple. There are those who make simple things complex and there are those who make complex things simple. Which one are you? Until you are able to break complex things into simpler forms, your relevance in a VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) world is uncertain.

Wale Akinyemi is the founder of the Street University. Email: [email protected]