And now the other side of the coin: everything is simple.
There’s a drawing I joke about in the office. (There are two actually, but I’ll get to the other one a bit later.) This one is my standard architectural drawing. It’s how you build something.
Most everyone I work with laughs when I draw it. Or they roll their eyes. They don’t realize that I draw it seriously.
That’s it.
And this is not me trying to be a smart-ass. I have yet to find an example of something that needed to be built that didn’t end up being two boxes and a line between it.
Now, I’ll grant you that this might not hold for everything and that there could be web application work that didn’t come down to this design. But this covers a great many cases; it includes all the ones where you actually need a whiteboard and people in a room to discuss.
Complex problems have to be broken down. And, generally speaking, most problems involve going from Point A to Point B. And I have found that this helps me, this drawing. It’s a focus — suddenly the problem isn’t about the 107,000 items, but the root issue: what is it I am trying to solve and how can I build that line?
That’s it. Everything else comes out of that, but to keep the problem simple and easy to understand — that’s not only a skill, but it’s a necessity.
Simple is good.
Hmm. This reminds me of going on a hike during one of the wife’s company retreats. We have about 15 Type A consultants (and yours truly) gathered in the parking lot in the middle of the desert around Las Vegas. Our objective is to summit this little hill called Turtle Head Peak. So what do they do?
Point A to Point B.
Since there is no vegetation to speak of, everyone just starts walking straight towards it. And up. After a few miles, dry creek crossings, and rock scrambling, we paused for a rest. I jogged to the side up a little hill to get a better lay of the land, looked up and realized we were approaching from below an escarpment; we’d never get to the top from this side. I took over the lead and we got back to a legitimate trail, learned it would be another two hours of hiking to get to the top. Almost everyone was more than halfway through their water, so we took the trail back to the parking lot trailhead (which was on the opposite end from where we’d parked).
Lesson: Point A to Point B mentality FAIL.
Wait, so are you implying they were overcomplicating the problem? Or that simple isn’t the best way to break down problems?
Or that perhaps it is a bit more complicated than point a to point b. Which in this case it was, given that we had no way to safely scale the escarpment which we’d have faced at the top.
Breaking things down into simple steps is, I think, a great way to chart a bigger path. it is also important that realize that some ‘doers’ out there see the start and the finish. Only. They weren’t OVERcomplicating it, they were OVERsimplifying it. Which is a good way to get dead in the desert.
And I’ll let you nail me on this one: my intention was not to say that everything was a matter of ‘a to b, the end.’
i meant that everything is ‘a to b: but, in order to accomplish it, might need a ton of little a to b’s to get there.’
hopefully this was more clear in my next post — the goal for your guys was ‘a to b’ but it required a bunch of other steps to get it right.
i don’t think we are actually disagreeing here — and congrats on saving lives!