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?

I love the new features of iTunes 10. I love Ping, the new music-centric social network that Apple introduced with the new software. I just have one question: What’s up with the buttons?

If there’s one thing that’s Apple’s speciality it’s attention to detail in design leading to excellent consistent user experiences. So, then it remains to be seen why Apple would deliberately make the the close/minimize/maximize buttons on iTunes 10 different than on every other piece of software for the Macintosh:

It’s not as if it’s difficult to figure out how to use the new buttons, but they are the wrong size and in the wrong position. The buttons now make me stop and think about where I’m clicking. Why introduce this nuisance? It’s very unlike Apple.

As a follow-up to my previous post on fixing iPhone 3G slowness after upgrading to iOS 4.0, I’m happy to report that at Apple’s music event today (watch the video here), Steve Jobs announced that iOS 4.1 will permanently fix the bug that caused the iPhone 3G issues.

You can check out this post from Engadget for more info.

Words are Important

The business world seems to generate more jargon and buzzwords than goods and services these days. Words are being misused and abused. This is a disaster because words are important. When words can be made to mean anything, they mean nothing. Without precise meaning, we can’t form rational thought and the world is lost. So, in the interest of saving the world, I humbly present my fifth installment of this series on words:

800-pound Gorilla

What it means

This is a metaphor for any person with enough clout to ignore all rules, restrictions and conventions.

Where does an 800-pound gorilla sit?
Wherever it wants.

How it’s used

Recently, the 800-pound gorilla metaphor has been blended with “the elephant in the room” to become “the 800-pound gorilla in the room”. The elephant in the room is the big obvious problem that everyone is ignoring. Perhaps it’s being ignored because it’s a difficult problem to solve, or it would be politically indelicate to address, or would require a radical change in approach to deal with it. In those cases it’s often more convenient for people to simply look the other way and pretend the problem doesn’t exist.

My father had big, loud, hacking coughs from smoking for years right up until the day he died from lung cancer. Nobody ever really talked about that in my house.

The implication of cross-breeding the elephant with the 800-lb gorilla is that there nothing that can be done about powerful people or entities that throw their weight around. They are inevitable, and so it’s probably easier to try to get on with life as if they don’t exist. I blame this usage mostly on the moronic advertising team for AXA Equitable.

Why it’s important

We should be able to distinguish between large problems caused by opportunistic bullies and large problems that are merely uncomfortable or difficult to deal with. For example, in dealing with the Gulf oil spill, BP’s proposed solutions seem to be focused on maintaining the viability of the well rather than on quickly stopping the flow of oil. Though they possess enormous wealth, they certainly seem to be taking their sweet time, pursuing fixes in serial, rather than in parallel, always trying the least costly and drastic first instead of moving immediately to the most promising methods. We’re all on their timetable.

How does an 800-pound gorilla clean up an oil spil?
However it wants.

Why is President Obama taking so long to figure out “whose ass to kick”? That, my friends, is the elephant in the room.

Image by Raul654

Words are Important

The business world seems to generate more jargon and buzzwords than goods and services these days. Words are being misused and abused. This is a disaster because words are important. When words can be made to mean anything, they mean nothing. Without precise meaning, we can’t form rational thought and the world is lost. So, in the interest of saving the world, I humbly present my fourth installment of this series on words:

Technically

What it means

Having practical knowledge of a specialized field, usually something scientific or mechanical.

“Having been an auto mechanic for thirty years, Charlie is technically skilled. He can fix any car you bring into his shop.”

How it’s used

Somehow, the word “technically” has gotten sort of mashed up with the meaning of the word “technicality”. A technicality is something like “a distinction that only means something important to an expert”. But it goes further than that. “Technically” has somehow morphed into meaning “a kind of a thing, that really isn’t that kind of a thing because most people mistake it for another kind of a thing, and the popular opinion is the one that really matters.”

“A tomato is technically a fruit.”

Why it’s important

The implication here is that if enough people make a dumb mistake, it ceases to become a mistake, and instead becomes a fact. Enough people think that tomatoes are vegetables so they somehow enter a state where they really are vegetables even if they technically are fruit.

You eat tomatoes in a salad, and salads have vegetables, so tomatoes must be vegetables. Everyone knows that.

Of course, tomatoes that aren’t the only “vegetables” that are really fruits. Cucumbers, zucchini, squash, pumpkins … all fruits. If it has seeds, it’s a fruit. By definition.

This use of “technically” always shows a defect in thinking. Sometimes it’s used as an apology for being correct (“Sorry, but technically they speak Portugese in Brazil, not Spanish.”). I do not know why learned people feel obligated to make these concessions to the ignorant. Other times it’s a poor attempt to undermine a perfectly reasonable argument (“Well, maybe technically it’s on your side of the property line, but you can’t build a fence on my lawn.”). But no matter how many people really, really want it to be otherwise, you can’t collectively wish something into being a fact (although you might technically be suffering from some kind of mass delusion).

Image by Yvwv