Cut and Keep It Simple
When we start in business, we tend to go everywhere and try to please everyone.
Every enquiry looks like an opportunity. Every customer looks like one worth having. Saying no feels like turning money away.
So the advice we get is almost always the same. Choose your niche. Know your customer avatar. Serve them with a limited set of products and services.
Cut, and keep it simple.
The same pattern, everywhere
Software development follows the same path. Teams keep adding features and functions. Each one is requested by someone, each one looks small, and each one seems to add value. Then the architects step in and advise the opposite: limit the features, limit the functions, protect the core.
Cut, and keep it simple.
It shows up in our personal lives too. We end most weekends tired, and for the same reason. We try to do too many things. The few days that could have restored us are spent catching up, running around and fitting in one more thing.
Different settings. Same pattern. We add by default.
The answer is rarely more
The focus should therefore always be on cutting and simplifying.
When something is not working, our first instinct is to add. More people. More software. More process. More controls. It feels like action, and it is easy to justify.
But we may not need more people, more software or more complicated processes. Often, we need less of what we already have, used better.
I see this regularly in ERP programs. When a program struggles, the response is usually to add something: another workstream, another consultant, another reporting layer, another tool to track the other tools. Each addition makes the program heavier, not clearer. The programs that recover are usually the ones that stop, strip back to what matters, and remove what does not.
Choke points, not ammunition
Battles are not won by massive ammunition and armies. They are won by leveraging key choke points to your advantage.
Simplicity works the same way. It is not doing less for the sake of less. It is finding the few points where effort matters most and putting your weight there. A small number of decisions, processes and relationships carry most of the outcome. Everything else is noise around them.
The more we add, the harder those points become to see.
Simplicity is hard
None of this is new. Most of us have heard it many times. Yet very few of us live it.
That is because it is hard work. Simplicity is hard. It does not come naturally to us.
Adding is easy. It asks no one to give anything up. Cutting requires a decision, and every decision to cut has a cost. Keeping it simple requires the same decision again and again, because complexity never stops arriving.
So the question is not whether simplicity is a good idea. We all agree it is.
The question is: what are you prepared to let go of today?
And what commitment and effort are you going to put in to keep things simple, tomorrow and the day after?
