Make Your Work More Meaningful by Killing Complexity
by Ken Sterling for Inc.
When computers came to the workplace, we were sold with promises of increased time savings and productivity. Then big data came along and we were told we would work better and smarter. Now we have more data than we could ever use, but instead of making our work more efficient and smarter it has only made it busier and less meaningful.
According to the Harvard Business Review, companies are now collecting six times the number of performance metrics than they did in 1955. With all this extra data collection and analysis, there's less time for meaningful work. Therefore, it's no surprise that a Boston Consulting Group report found that managers in the most complex organizations now spend 30 to 60 percent of their time in meetings and 40 percent of their time writing reports (generally used for meetings).
According to Lisa Bodell, CEO of futurethink, thought leader, and author of the award-winning book Kill the Company and Why Simple Wins, complexity is the enemy of meaningful work and is destroying our companies. Between endless meetings and countless emails, workers in complex companies only get 6.5 hours of meaningful work done—in a week.
The complexity trap.Complexity is a danger to all organizations. According to Bodell, if your company operates with complexity, it cannot operate with speed. So newer organizations, who provide simpler answers for customers can swoop in and take your business because you're too slow and too busy working on reports.