No, decompexifing isn’t a word or at least it wasn’t a word until I right-clicked it into existence by adding it to my MS Office dictionary—now it’s real.
As silly as it sounds, the logic behind the creation of decomplexification isn’t that different from how the world of work was built.
Curious, creative people just like us identified problems and struggled to find the words to describe them. When they couldn’t find the words or the words simply didn’t exist, they created their own. Fast forward to today and you need to hire an interpreter to understand what the supply chain folks are talking about.
The problem is that we are now dealing with complexity-for-complexity’s sake.
We have grossly over-complicated our world of work.
We’ve allowed ourselves to be so intimidated by complexity, that we don’t even question it.
Worse yet, we’ve come to distrust simple things, simply because they lack complexity.
No more.
I hereby commit to decomplexifing the world of work by busting bad business rules.
Here’s the first…
Education as a Proxy for Experience:
If you are hiring someone straight out of school, sure, use education as a proxy for experience. But to refuse, or even disqualify a worker that’s been with the organization for 5, 10, 20 years because they didn’t take the “Principals of Managerial Science” in 1996 simply seems irrelevant.
Case in Point:
This kind of thinking would have excluded the degree-less administrative assistant Colleen Barrett from becoming President Emeritus of Southwest Airlines and being consistently recognized as one of the most powerful business women in America.
What Bad Business Rules do you want to Bust?
Until next time, stay connected.
Jeff
