Six Simple Rules. Yves Morieux

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      Smart Simplicity

      The simple rules are a way for managers to break out of this doom loop and start moving beyond the hard and soft approaches in order to deal effectively with business complexity (see the sidebar “The Six Simple Rules Overview”). The primary goal is to create more value by better managing business complexity. However, as managers peel away the stitches and patches that have accumulated through the use of approaches that are obsolete in today’s world, the by-product is also the elimination of complicatedness and its attendant costs. In this respect, the six rules constitute a third revolution in management—”smart simplicity.” By helping manage complexity and remove complicatedness, the simple rules allow organizations simultaneously to improve performance and engagement. What’s more, the doom loop is transformed into a virtuous circle: better performance leads to more opportunities for people; more opportunities generate more engagement; more engagement nurtures higher aspirations and contributes to even better performance.

      The rules are based on the premise that the key to managing complexity is the combination of autonomy and cooperation. These are two words that people rarely think of as going together, but it is precisely the combination of the two that is required to handle complexity without complicatedness. Individual autonomy harnesses people’s flexibility and agility; meanwhile, cooperation brings synergy so that everyone’s efforts are multiplied in the most effective way for the group.

      The purpose of the simple rules is to create situations in which each person’s autonomy—in using judgment and energy—is made more effective by the rest of the group, and in which people put their autonomy in the service of the group. The rules are designed to create an organizational context in which cooperation becomes the best choice for each individual. In other words, these rules help organize and manage in a way that makes cooperation an individually useful behavior—a “rational strategy”—for people. The simple rules do not aim at controlling employees by imposing formal guidelines and processes; rather, they create an environment in which employees work together to develop creative solutions to complex challenges.¹³ The cooperation achieved thanks to the simple rules is such that, at any time, people are mutually advantaged and impelled by others to come up with the right solutions to deal with performance requirements, even if what is right cannot be specified in advance.¹⁴ Simplifying in a naive way—by ignoring or discarding business complexity—is a dead end. You have to be smart and play on people’s smartness. You have to recognize business complexity and simplify in a way that leverages people’s intelligence and judgment. The combination of autonomy and cooperation allows you to do this.

      THE SIX SIMPLE RULES OVERVIEW

      Why not fewer than six rules? We know that the six rules cannot be boiled down to fewer rules because no rule can be deducted from the five others. None of the six rules is superfluous. Vice versa, we have never encountered a situation in which the solution would not be a combination of some of the six rules. It is not necessary to add another rule. Together the six rules constitute a minimum sufficient set to confront complexity.

      The first three rules are designed to give people an advantage in the way they mobilize their intelligence and energy at work by providing them with relevant knowledge, room for maneuver, power, and the resource of cooperation. The first simple rule is about understanding what people do and why they do it. The second rule is about the utilization of power to foster cooperation. The third rule is about the production of power. These first three rules create the conditions for individual autonomy so that its effectiveness can be multiplied through cooperation from others.

      Simple rules four, five, and six are designed to impel people to confront complexity and to use their autonomy to cooperate with others, by embedding feedback loops that expose them as directly as possible to the consequences of their actions, without the need for extra supervision and structure or for the bureaucracy of compliance metrics and incentives. The fourth and fifth rules create direct feedback loops that are intrinsically embedded into work processes and activities. The direct feedback loops created by the fourth rule are based on interdependencies—space, so to speak. The feedback loops of the fifth rule are based on time, directly gratifying or penalizing people depending on how well they do today for tomorrow. When work processes do not allow for direct feedback loops, management intervention is needed as a last resort to close them, through evaluation. This is the role of the sixth rule.

      In summary, the first three rules use the group effect to give people’s autonomy an advantage in best using their energy and judgment, while the last three rules impel people to put their autonomy in the best service of the group. Whenever people apply their full energy and intelligence to the greater range of possible solutions that arises from cooperation, they are bound to reach superior solutions to those predefined or hard-wired in procedures and structures and to the loose compromises of collaboration within informal, consensus-seeking groups.

      By calling the rules “simple,” we don’t mean to imply that they are necessarily easy to put into practice. Using them requires managers to think differently and work differently. Nor do we mean that managers should pursue simplification as a goal in itself.¹⁵ What we do mean, however, is that these rules allow executives to create competitive advantage by exploiting complexity without getting СКАЧАТЬ