In war, concentrate your forces.
In work, concentrate your information.
In my recent work, I’ve been reflecting on how organizations handle complexity—and how simplicity often hides in plain sight.
A long time ago, I began keeping a Commonplace Book. This is a simple collection of quotes and thoughts from my reading. I read novels, poetry, history, science, every subject imaginable, and took stuff from each. As I kept up the practice, this collection blossomed—perhaps “bloated”—to more than 1.1 million words. This rather large body of information is not organized, in any meaningful way. It’s set down in chronological order, according to when I read it. You might think this disorganization would make it fairly useless, a big landfill of typing, but you’d be wrong. It’s unbelievably useful.
To illustrate how concentrated information can unlock insight, let’s take a detour to the Renaissance. Let’s ask, “Why is the Mona Lisa smiling?”
I think there is a real, true answer to this question, not just idle conjecture. I read about it somewhere, a long time ago. I mean a really long time ago, when some of you were not yet on the planet. Where did I see it?
Answer in two seconds.
Leonardo undertook to execute, for Francesco del Giocondo, the portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife; and after toiling over it for four years, he left it unfinished; and the work is now in the collection of King Francis of France, at Fontainebleau.
Mona Lisa being very beautiful, he always employed, while he was painting her portrait, persons to play or sing, and jesters, who might make her remain merry, in order to take away that melancholy which painters are often wont to give to the portraits that they paint. And in this work of Leonardo's there was a smile so pleasing, that it was a thing more divine than human to behold; and it was held to be something marvellous, since the reality was not more alive. — Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists
In business, a body of information often disintegrates, when it should concentrate. “Experts” claim their territory, and their first step is to insist that “this” cannot live alongside “that.” I once worked on a set of policies (lists of ‘shoulds’ and ‘should nots’) and its accompanying set of procedures (here’s how we do the shoulds and avoid the should nots). The policies and the procedures were kept in separate libraries, at separate intranet locations. Our company expected employees to know this, and to ricochet between the two.
Several times I asked, “If we want people to carry out the policies using the approved procedures, would that be more likely to happen if they could find both together?”
No one else asked this question, and no one agreed. No problem; I’m comfortable being Mr. Weirdo. When the two libraries were consolidated years later, I suggested we put the polices and procedures in one document. That was the stupidest idea my coworkers ever heard. Instead, they made three separate entries in the remaining library, covering our policy area.
When systems resist clarity, create your own.
We can’t reorder the world, but we can reorder our copy of it. Accepting my failure to persuade, I thought about my job and asked myself, “What can I do to make this easier?” I would be asked about these policies and how to implement them, nearly every day. I went to the library, copied all three reference documents, and pasted them into one. When I got a question about mobile devices, I clicked on my document, typed in “mobile” and threw the appropriate language back. This one favor saved me many hours, hunting for answers.
You wouldn’t go into battle with half your ammunition hidden in eight places. Put everything you need to know in one place, and you may be surprised at how simple the work becomes.
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