Newsletter #3

Reflection I have spent the past month talking to pretty much everyone in the HR and Finance specialities who were willing to talk with me. There was something that really stood out to me when I step back and looked at my copious notes on the interactions:

There is a surprising level of complexity that I did not really understand in the completion of their jobs Everyone’s perception of reality is different.

The former is not much of a surprise to me. I did not expect to understand the complexities when I started spending time with (the incredibly generous) people who I spared their time. I have a much better understanding of this now, and it helps inform the plans I am putting together.

It did surprise me - a lot - that they had an appreciation for the complexity of their tasks, but not necessarily whether the complexity was essential complexity vs accidental complexity.

I define Essential complexity as necessary - if we take that complexity away, the task itself loses value. Hence essential complexity cannot be stripped away from a task. An example of essential complexity is collecting tax information when an employee is onboarding. You cannot say ‘let’s make the task simpler by not collecting tax information’ both because it is mandated by law and the onboarding process itself will be incomplete if not done.

On the other hand, Accidental complexity is complexity introduced by inefficiency. This could be a lack of automation, poor process, under optimized organization or poor leadership. We have all seen this and have lived this. It happens. Smart organizations recognize this accidental complexity and simplify it.

There is a subset of accidental complexity that I am interested in: Complexity that exists because the protagonists do not understand the existence of accidental complexity. There exist better ways of reducing complexity (e.g with technology) that are not understood. And this is a niche I am solving for.

Progress I am pleased to be slowing down on the customer interviews - I feel I have spent enough time deeply understanding the domain, and I am excited to be building something new! Much of what I will build will be dogfooding my opinions, expressed recently at Navigating the Post-Cloud era.

Learning

All the customer interviews I have had reminded me of something I had read a while back - Reality has a surprising amount of detail is a wonderful writeup on how seemingly simple things - like boiling water - has a surprising amount of complexity that is not appreciated. I think a lot about this particular statement in this essay:

This means it’s really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important.

I was quite struck by how much I learned about a space I was already familiar with, by putting others in the driver's seat and only asking questions (and very carefully avoiding leading questions), and consciously asking people about the details that seem obvious to them (but are not to me)

On break next week I will be heading the NYC next week, so the next newsletter will be the week after. Hope you find my thoughts interesting - please do drop me a line to let me know if I should continue and what you’d like to hear about

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