BCG's Smart Simplicity concept eliminates unnecessary complicatedness from companies—by diagnosing problems and designing solutions.
Expanding regulations, new technologies, and rising customer expectations are just some of the complexities that organizations confront. Historically, companies have responded to such external requirements and challenges by increasing their internal complicatedness, which BCG defines as the number of procedures, vertical layers, interface structures, coordination bodies, decision approvals, and other add-ons.
Complicatedness results in many performance issues, such as high costs, slow decision-making, siloed thinking, a lack of innovation, 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 helps organizations identify and resolve unnecessary complicatedness and deliver lasting, measurable change. How does a Smart Simplicity approach 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.
Smart Start. We start by conducting our Complicatedness Survey to pinpoint symptoms of complicatedness across eight key dimensions and identify pain points that are hindering performance in your organization.
Diagnosis. Using Smart Simplicity’s proven diagnostic tools, deep-dive employee interviews, and behavioral science, we identify the root causes of complicatedness and establish the link between context and behavior. We then determine how changes to the context will make new behaviors rational—and thereby improve performance.
Solution. Finally, we apply six simple rules for overcoming complexity, a set of Smart Simplicity strategies that are based on economics, game theory, and organizational sociology.
Implementation. To ensure that change is happening, we provide an implementation roadmap and embed Smart Simplicity thinking within the organization.
BCG has applied the Smart Simplicity approach in various types of businesses—including banks, utilities, insurance agencies, retail chains, and manufacturers—and delivered a wide range of sustainable performance improvements. The scope of Smart Simplicity has further extended to address complex global challenges, including hunger, climate change, and urban mobility.
Preventing stunting is a highly complex problem due to the many stakeholders; it’s also a complicated problem because it requires well-coordinated interventions delivered to children at scale. BCG’s Smart Simplicity approach helped develop the Stunting-Free Village model.
Applying a new approach to chronic child hunger in Tanzania yields powerful lessons for governments and organizations that are tackling other tough challenges.
To overcome climate inaction, we must understand the rationale for individuals’ behaviors, identify the groups that could change those behaviors, and work with those groups to transform the vicious cycle into a virtuous one.
To unlock the opportunities that green and shared mobility offer, private players must set up coalitions of complementary actors developing end-to-end, scaled, profitable and sustainable mobility services. And public authorities have the duty to create the conditions for such coalition to emerge.
By Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman
Order on Amazon Order on Barnes & Noble What People Are Saying To Boost Productivity, Try Smart Simplicity
By gaining a better understanding of employee behavior, a large hotel chain finds the solution to poor profitability in Smart Simplicity.
By getting workers to understand that they depend on one another for success, a large industrial company tackled complexity and stopped a decline in product quality.
By giving more power to more people, a large retailer found a lasting solution to dwindling sales.
A manufacturer turned to Smart Simplicity to foster internal cooperation and speed up product innovation.
BCG’s Peter Tollman says that organizations need new approaches to help them succeed in an age of increasing complexity.
The experience of work during a time of pandemic has revealed a hidden driver of organizational performance: relational productivity.
Digital transformation is vital to companies’ survival, yet it is threatened by complicatedness. A four-step process helps organizations combat complicatedness—and set the stage for success.
Companies are revolutionizing how people work. Now they need to transform how managers manage.
Companies that successfully root out complicatedness will increase their productivity and gain a competitive advantage.
