The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

Phew.

Anyway, years ago, one of my mentors – the wonderful Lee Hill – told me something that had a profound effect on me.

“When their solution is more complicated than your problem, why would you do it?”

The point he was making was there are a lot of companies out there who care more about showing-off how smart they are than addressing their clients actual need and so the result is they propose a lot of ‘complexity’ to either justify their price or to satisfy their ego.

There’s one place in my past that embodied this.

300-page decks.
Incredible amounts of technical detail.
An emphasis on their approach more than the problem.

Don’t get me wrong, they were good, had a bunch of talented people and did some truly brilliant work … however the problem [at least for me] was that every challenge ended up being approached in basically the same way because their way was to fit every client problem into how they worked rather than adapt their way of working to solve what the client problem actually needed.

By that, I’m not suggesting they should only have looked for simplistic solutions.
Nor am I suggesting they should have ignored their specific skills and talent.
And I’m not in any way suggesting they didn’t want to help their clients.

However, while you could argue many companies approach their work in a similar way, they were the only ones who seemed to revel in actively showing how complicated their ‘solutions’ were, which may explain why they revered consultancies more than creativity and why there was as much complexity inside the organization as there was in their recommendations.

Which reminds me of a story I’ve told many times:

Decades ago, the US navy were looking for a new fighter jet.

Over a series of days, the admiralty invited executives from the main fighter plane developers to come pitch their ideas.

Each day, a mass of engineers would walk into a room featuring a long table surrounded by highly awarded officers to explain why their plane was the one they should invest the billions of US tax dollars into.

On the last day, 3 people from Lockhead Martin walked into the room.

One went up to the end of the table, produced a ball-bearing and – in true Hollywood style – rolled it down the table.

As it slowly passed the Navy Officers, he stated:

“Gentleman, would you like a fighter jet that registers the size of this ball-bearing on the enemies’ radar? These gentlemen will explain how we can do it”.

They won the contract, which resulted in the iconic A-12.

The point of this is their approach was centered on identifying the clients real need – where all the other shit was stripped away – which allowed them to address the problem in a way where their solution could clearly, simply and powerfully express a focused benefit.

No complexity.
No ambiguity.
Just clarity.

Of course, building a plane is as complex-as-fuck, but by doing it this way everyone was not just focused on the prize, but united in the key objective.

Or as Michael Mann, the film director once told me:

“I explain how I see the movie I want to make to all the people in the team and ask them to bring their talent to make it even better than I hoped. But I remind them it’s how I see the movie, not how they wish I saw the movie”.

The point of this is because I saw something recently that I think is a brilliant example of ‘clarity thinking’.

Something I imagine that was full of challenges and complexity – both in terms of input and output – but has a solution that is compelling, unifying and simple for all parties and audiences.

This.

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