Organizations must tackle external complexities such as additional regulations, new technologies, and more complex customer expectations. Historically, their response has been to increase their internal complicatedness, which BCG defines as the number of procedures, vertical layers, interface structures, coordination bodies, decision approvals, and other add-ons.
Increasing this complicatedness results in many performance issues, such as high costs, slow decision-making, siloed thinking, a lack of innovation, slow movement, and difficulty getting things done—all common concerns of CEOs today.
While complexity is a fact of business life, complicatedness doesn’t have to be.
Smart Simplicity, BCG’s innovative approach to solving this issue, can simplify organizations by helping them identify and resolve unnecessary complicatedness and deliver lasting, measurable change. How does Smart Simplicity differ from traditional solutions? We take into consideration the drivers of behavior—the context that employees work within—and then shape this context to achieve the desired behaviors.
To do this, Smart Simplicity applies a holistic framework in four steps:
Traditional solutions to complexity don’t consider context or the conditions under which employees work. With Smart Simplicity, BCG works to understand how context and behavior relate to each other before choosing the optimal combination of interventions for your specific context and issues. Smart Simplicity aims to change the context in a way that makes the desired behavior the typical choice.