Digitalist Magazine: Why Simple Wins
by Fawn Fitter for Digitalist Magazine
When futurist Lisa Bodell tried to teach Fortune 500 companies around the world how to nurture innovation, she repeatedly hit the same roadblock: no matter how open people were to her suggestions, they didn’t seem to have time to implement them.The reason, Bodell discovered, had little to do with a heavy workload or ambitious objectives. Rather, employees spent more time submitting to complex mandatory procedures than developing and implementing new ideas. Bodell’s new book, Why Simple Wins, argues that if companies want more space and time for innovation, they need to chip away those calcified layers of process.We asked Bodell to explain how companies can battle complexity and why she believes the fight needs to be elevated to the C-suite.Digitalist: What do you mean by needless complexity?Lisa Bodell: People can’t innovate because they’re drowning in mundane, outdated processes that were initially put in place for good reasons but have calcified over time and enslaved them. The average workday is 45% meetings, 23% e-mail, and 18% nonproductive work. That leaves only 14%—6.6 hours a week, less than one full workday—for meaningful work.It’s not that we don’t need reports and meetings. But we’re addicted to doing instead of thinking. Steve Jobs famously declared in 1997, “I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”Read More →