NASA optimizes for performance. We optimize for cost. They pay five times the cost for the last 5 percent of performance.

- Tom Mueller, Vice President of Propulsion, SpaceX

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

- Albert Einstein

Anybody interested in improving personal or group performance struggles constantly between “Get it Done” and “Get it Perfect”. We want to do our best, and to be proud of the work we do. We also want to get things accomplished and move on to the next important thing.

We make this compromise in two distinct ways. First and most obviously, we do our best up to a point, declare the work “good enough” and then move on. The other way we create “good enough” solutions is to ask a different question, reframe it as a simpler problem and solve that with a simpler solution.

Most of the time, these are good compromises to make, but many times — too often, in fact — they create bigger problems than they solve and can cause a cascade of disasters.

Half-assed is worse than lazy
People at the supermarket who don’t put their shopping carts back annoy me. They make parking spots unusable and make parking lots difficult to navigate for everyone else. One supermarket where I used to shop was on a main highway, and carts would roll out of the parking lots and into oncoming traffic! People create this disorder and mayhem to save themselves about twenty or thirty feet of walking. Seriously, how much lazier can a person be?

But in their laziness, these people have spawned a second solution. Supermarkets hire people to scour the parking lot for carts, gather them together and wheel them back in front of the store. There are downsides. Prices are higher because the market has at least one more salary to pay. Parking lots are still littered with stray carts, but that can be managed to the point of a low-level annoyance that most people don’t even notice anymore. In short, it’s an ugly solution but for the most part it works (even if it does cause a bit of resentment from people who put their carts back themselves).

If we have two working solutions, then why is there a problem?

There is a third group of shoppers who are the actual cause of the shopping cart madness. They push their carts over to the holding stall like group one. But instead of stacking the carts together, they fling them from about six feet away and make a group two style mess inside the holding stall (see pic above).

By committing half-way, they make the holding stall unusable, not only for group one, but for the supermarket employees in group two. They may sort of solve the problem of their individual cart but their “compromise” has broken the entire system of dealing with all carts. To a large degree, they are guilty of creating the hassle that drives people to join group two in the first place.

The worst part, is I’m sure these people think they are making a good compromise. “At least I didn’t leave the cart in the parking lot,” they must think, “It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

• Think about the effects of your “good enough” compromises and try to see where you may be unintentionally creating “group three” disasters.
• When giving performance reviews, do you recognize your “group three” employees as negatively affecting your team, or do you fill the box for “Consistently puts shopping cart back in stall” with “Meets expectations”?

Simple is Better than Overly-simple
I’m a big fan of simplification. When we try to tackle a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, the best way forward is often to break it down into simple manageable chunks. If we ask less complex questions, good answers are easier to find.

And if simple is good, simpler is always better, right?

Wrong.

Once a client asked me to design a simple group calendar with some automated workflow through Outlook forms. Because of some inconsistencies with their Outlook deployment, it turned out to be not such a straight-forward endeavor. The forms worked for some people, but not for others.

There were two solutions on the table that would have solved the problem. We could have re-imaged about 50 computers to ensure that everyone in this workgroup had an identical build (i.e., solve the problem by fixing Outlook inconsistencies). Alternately, we could have quickly built a web-based solution that hooked into Exchange server on the backend (i.e., sidestep the Outlook issues altogether).

It was decided that both of these solutions were too complex. We were told to continue to troubleshoot the “simple” Outlook forms solution. Though we spent a little less time than we would have with one of the proposed solutions, ultimately we wound up with a half-working process that was part manual and part automated and wasn’t really any better than the original manual one.

Sure we saved time by removing complexity. But we would have seen a much more worthwhile return if we invested the time in one of the more permanent fixes. We over-simplified the problem to the point that we didn’t solve the original problem. It would have made more sense to scrap the initiative altogether.

• Think for a moment about past projects that didn’t go to plan. Can you identify an instance when over-simplifying caused you just as much work as tackling the original problem?

In 1714, the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act, which set up a £20,000 prize to the person who could come up with a way to accurately determine longitude (where you are East-to-West) for a ship at sea. This was a major business problem for shipping between Europe and the New World that needed to be solved. The prize was equivalent to over $4.5 million in today’s cash – an 18th century prototype for the X PRIZE.

The mathematics of the problem were simple. The real issue was that the math required an accurate measure of the time of day. The only clocks at the time accurate enough to solve the problem were pendulum clocks, which are utterly useless on a rocking sailing ship. So, the race to solve the longitude problem was really a race to engineer a clock that would work on a boat.

An English clockmaker named John Harrison worked for almost thirty years to solve the problem. His first attempts were based on the idea that a clock’s pendulum could be replaced by springs and balances. These would not only keep time, but subtract out the motion of the ship. Harrison spent over twenty years refining this idea. The only problem was it didn’t really work.

Harrison had been trying to build a kind of pendulum that could work on a moving boat. However, after designing a precision pocket watch to help him with observation and measurements, Harrison realized he had been looking at the problem the wrong way all along. Pocket watches at the time were far too inaccurate and unreliable to solve the longitude problem. However, despite this major weakness, pocket watches performed reasonably well, and more importantly did so while moving around in a person’s pocket.

Harrison realized his very difficult motion problem had already been solved. He didn’t need a pendulum clock that worked on a boat, he needed a pocket watch that was very accurate. It only took him six years to solve this simpler problem. The result – the H4 marine chronometer, which won the Longitude Prize and changed maritime transportation forever.

What inspires me about Harrison’s story is not just his dogged perseverance in working the problem for thirty years. I am awed by the selflessness and courage it took Harrison to reframe his problem, abandon over twenty years of work and move in a new direction. Sometimes the answer is not a tweak of the obvious solution, but rather a refinement of something that on the surface seems completely inadequate to the task.

How often do we get stuck doing what we do because it’s what we’re comfortable with, or it’s our biggest selling product or service, or we’re out to prove something to the world? When we can let go of all that, we can finally begin to define our work not by the things we do, but by the problems that we solve.

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To read more about John Harrison, check out the excellent book Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.

Image by lucunus

I had a great conversation last night with my friend Mark. Among many other things we talked about, we came around to the topic of the paperless office. For about a decade now, we’ve heard that we are at the dawn of the paperless office. Documents can be virtualized, then organized and re-organized on a whim. Data in XML format can be ported and shared between people and applications with very little loss due to “friction” in process. We are no longer beholden to the costs of filing and storing physical paper pages.

So, why do we still use paper?

I think there are two main reasons:

• Paper is cheap.
• Paper is simple to use, and as a technology, provides additional functionality over what current computer displays can provide.

Since I know very little about the economics of paper production, I can’t really address the first point, other than to say if paper suddenly jumped in price the way gasoline has, I doubt you’d see nearly as many people in the office sending those 200 page reports over to the LaserJet.

The second point however is firmly in techno-weenie land (my happy home). What kind of digital technology can compete with paper for functionality and ease-of-use?

Readability
Face it, computer screens are hard to read. If you look at them too long you go cross-eyed. Innovations like the Amazon Kindle make me hopeful that in the near future, all monitors will be similarly optimized for document readability.

Organizing, highlighting and notetaking
The one thing you definitely learn after you’ve shuffled papers around your desk for any length of time is that paper is easy to shuffle around. If you want to combine a spreadsheet and a document into one report, all you need is a stapler. Marking up printed documents is simple and quick.

Touch screen interfaces seem to be the best prospect for easy manipulation of digital documents. Personally, I think the best current implementation is Apple’s iPhone. Microsoft also has an exciting offering in this space, called Surface. Rather than being a touchscreen you can fit in your pocket like the iPhone, with Surface, the interface is a multi-touch tabletop. The demo shows applications in the home, restaurants, bars, etc.

Imagine a different application where your physical desktop is replaced with a Surface interface instead. You can do your regular computing with your standard keyboard/mouse/monitor. Then, we you need to, you just drag your document over to your Surface desktop, where you can use the touch interface to flip through documents, shuffle pages, blend documents together, insert photos, markup documents with a pen or stylus … whatever you want to do, all with the same relative ease of manipulating paper documents. The best of both worlds.

The biggest downside to this is that currently Surface is not available to consumers. Also, it’s very expensive, the main current target market being hotels, resorts, casinos, trendy high-end bars, etc. Also, let’s face it, as this hysterical Surface parody from SarcasticGamer points out, Surface is a big-ass table. There is a long way to go before this could be integrated into the workplace.

Power Consumption
You don’t have to plug paper in. Not sure what we can do about that one.

I believe the paperless office can actually become a reality, but we’re not really there yet. Why do I care so much about it? Because even though I’ve never hugged one, trees are nice. They provide shade, they make the air smell nice, they use up carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, and it sounds cool when wind blows through their leaves. We should cut fewer of them down.