IT’S COMPLICATED
We often associate complexity with sophistication and refinement. Be it a twin turbo inline, performance tuned sports car engine, a broad selection of niche product to choose from, or an elaborate process to follow, the world has grown more complex and tasks that used to be easy to perform are often no longer.
Mainz, Germany
Cathedral glass
Intricacy can be engaging and who isn’t fascinated by Rube Goldberg devices where a ball follows a convoluted pathway capture our attention and imagination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine
"… a chain reaction-type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and overly complicated way. ".
In the business of Design-Delivery, we want to tame this urge and instead design the ways we work for both ours and our client's benefit. The question to ask is then – what are we trying to accomplish and how can we do it as simply as possible? Another is - what benefit are we seeing from an increase in complexity or choice?
"Necessary Complexity" exists only to the degree needed to produce a desired result.
Scheduling a doctor’s visit used to be done with a telephone call. Today, we may begin with a call but usually must navigate through a touch-tone or voice activated menu and most likely will not speak with a real person. You may need to create an online account and review the physician's practice data collection policy, accept the website's "cookies", and finally, complete online form(s). You may experience a system “hang” from your internet connection, theirs, or a database glitch – and must start over again. It would be comical if it wasn’t so maddening!
And it is not just the doctor’s office, but true for many of the companies and organizations we routinely deal with. Did I mention there may also be a request to complete an online survey and to post an online review?
WHAT’S CHANGED?
TECHNOLOGY
Technology has erased the constraints of distance and shortened timeframes allowing the easy distribution of knowledge and work. It has also eliminated the space in-between tasks where we used to have time to think.
We have near instant access to information, can communicate seamlessly, and software lets us automate many work processes. This in turn reduces the need to hire people to handle ordinary tasks, saving those companies money and, in many respects, it shifts some of their work to you and me.
MULTIPLE CHOICE
The ability to narrowly differentiate and create specialized products and services provides greater choice and the potential to sell more focused goods and services. It also brings about the need for customers to conduct research and parse information. Purchasing a pair of sneakers used to depend on your age, gender, shoe size, a preferred company perhaps, the brand, color, and of course - cost. Now it’s become a decision further complicated by unique design features affecting performance, aesthetics, endorsements, materiality, where it is made and by whom with possible links to humanitarian efforts, and oh yes, what they’ll be used for – hiking, biking, climbing, walking, running, training, fill-in-your-specific-sport, or a hybrid, i.e., hiking-running, etc.
More recent purchase considerations for shoes involve compensating for pronation – or how our feet contact the ground when walking or jogging. Looking down we can see if our feet point straight ahead (neutral), point outwards like a “V” (under-pronate, or inward like an “A” (over-pronate). More than you wanted to know!
In the 1980’s the exteriors of many commercial buildings were constructed using brick, plaster / stucco, wood siding products like T-111 or storefront / curtainwall systems – or combination thereof. Plaster was a 3-coat system over metal lath. Materials were available from multiple manufacturer’s and put in place by skilled laborers. At the time of writing, Dryvit’s website lists 5 varieties of Commercial Cement Plaster (CCP) – it’s one-stop shopping for a system and every effort is made to make is easy to put in place as, depending on your region of the country, much labor is unskilled or semi-skilled.
REAL WORLD COMPLEXITIES
Several years ago, my firm tasked a well experienced architect to develop a new partition-types system for the office. After a 2-week effort we gathered in the conference room to view the new system. The walls were papered with detailed drawings of the many partitions with over 250 variations identified.
Starting with a basic partition, every possible permutation was treated as a separate drawing to be included in sets and with the expectation that each wall variation would be tagged individually.
Base partition – 3 5/8” metal studs, 5/8” gypsum board each side and extending to the structural deck above,
Variation with regular gypsum on one side and 1/2" tile backer board on the other.
Variation with tile backer board on both sides.
Variation with regular gypsum on one side and abuse resistant gypsum board on the other.
Variation with abuse resistant gypsum board on both sides.
Variation with abuse resistant gypsum board on one side and tile backer on the other.
You get the idea. But there’s more:
Base partition and each variant with sound attenuation batts.
Base partition with 2-layers of gypsum board on one side and one on the other plus all the variants listed above.
Base partition with 2-layers of gypsum board each side plus all the variants above.
And so on with chase walls, shaftwall, masonry, and furring…
The new system was quite logical but complex and time consuming to implement. A couple of architects took a different approach, creating a system comprised of 9 basic walls – with about half of those having 2-4 alternatives each for a total of 25 partition variations. It was a 90% reduction compared to the initial effort. They further incorporated written “rules” for the contractor into the Partition Notes that set default partitions covering the most typical conditions found on projects.
Example:
ALL INTERIOR PARTITIONS ARE TYPE “G3” WITH SOUND ATTENUATION BATTS, U.N.O.
MISCELLANEOUS NON-RATED CHASES TO BE 5/8” GYPSUM BOARD OVER 2 ½” METAL STUDS, U.N.O.
MISCELLANEOUS FURRING AROUND COLUMNS TO BE 5/8” GYPSUM BOARD OVER 7/8” FURRING CHANNELS, U.N.O.
This eliminated 80-90% of the partition tagging normally found on floor plans. It wasn’t just a matter of having a technically accurate partition-types system that covered every kind of wall, we also wanted a simple way to employ it on projects.
Where are all the Partition Tags?
The new system was easy to teach and readily understood by new hires and interns. My observations from over 25-years of using this system and derivative approaches on institutional, religious, and commercial projects was that contractors quickly understood it and we encountered no issues using a streamlined approach like this.
LEAN THINKING
Complexity isn’t necessarily good or bad, and it often solves a problem –the question is whether it is a necessary complexity, or not.
Lean thinking involves the relentless pursuit and elimination of waste and to make work to flow, and each aspect of complexity must serve these purposes as best we can make it. Necessary complexity can thus be considered an integral component of a Lean approach and it is present only to the degree required to make the process or effort Lean.
Looking at our work processes and how we implement technology, we can ask questions like these:
Do we see areas with un-necessary complexity that we can reduce?
Are our work processes readily understood and used by new employees?
How can our use of technology bring an advantage?
THE COST OF DOING BUSINESS
We see this play out in design firms where tasks that used to be simple, are no longer and it takes more time to provide an answer or to just "put pencil on paper". All of this translates into increasing our cost of doing business. Un-necessary complexity causes project teams to incur more time to perform the same work and affects the firm's bottom line.
How much effort is required in your firm to deliver $1 million of construction value? Are you seeing an improvement each year due to your implementation of technology or improved internal processes? If not, it may be time to ask why not.