“LESS is Enough”
The phrase “less is enough” is largely associated with the ascetism, applicable more to architecture & design but how does that apply to strategy? Is less really enough there…?
Am damn sure you are a smartphone user and I can vouch for many of you reading this on one such devices. Take a good look at your phone and count the number of applications there, either factory installed that came bundled in with the device when you bought it or installed by you as a part of setting up your device and getting it ready for use.
How many of those Apps do you tend to use on a daily cadence?
Stats show that it barely touches 10%
In fact, the number of users who don’t even know the names of some of those Apps installed are a staggering 85%.
When that totally is a quantitative problem occupying all those memory chunks and the most probable solution would be to manually remove those apps or to have some kind of a regular routine that pops up those Apps listed under “unused” prompting the user to remove them from the device.
But, that’s far from the description of “less is enough” although it has a faint correlation given the parlance of design pertaining to the device itself.
Less is enough
A bit of a background on the idea “less is enough”, it was used by the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe intern borrowed from the English poet Robert Browning who used it to describe his work ethos that seemed largely inspired by “constant reduction” meant to signify doing away with anything that doesn’t fit in directly or contribute in a way that identifies with the central stub.
“Less is enough” is largely applied to represent aesthetics over the interior designing / architecture in the construction domain representing all the individual elements / the product / project as a whole whose scope predominantly revolves around a sense of all-rounded minimalism, right from the approach and the mindset employed to go around the job on hand all through translating it to design and seeing that it lands well on the intended audience whilst rendering an experience that is unique and fascinating.
Let’s take the example of the APPLE logo itself.
From the depiction of historic times the symbolic representation of Newton seated under a tree with an apple about to fall and land on his head in the initial years to pure emphasis on the just the fruit, the shape of the apple with a slight bit knocked off from the far right to what it so commonly used today, it has seen many a transition.
But the whole concept of “less is enough” seems to have taken shape with the Apple logo dropping any sort of complication in design and relying purely on the shape around the year 2000s.
The concept in itself could be applied over many parlances over the PLC:
Application to Design
Application to Process & workflow
& a bonus would be
Application to Strategy
Application to Design
Breathable / minimalistic design is a concept that gets thrown around at so many conferences or makes a discussion across so many product teams over their regular workflows. But that doesn’t just apply to the UI bit (although it largely does) but it applies to the overall UX in a larger parlance.
Let’s take an instance of having to choose a university as a part of filling out an online application.
FORM 1:
FORM 2:
If FORM 2 which is minimalistic in design should do the job quite handsomely helping narrow in on the UNI within a matter of a few keystrokes amounting to 2 seconds they why would one need the elaborate & medieval FORM 1? Given all the possible typos that is just going to swell up the TAT translating to friction at the user’s end to begin with & bearing a negative effect on the UX most certainly.
NOTE: When one is referring to 2 forms here, it is imperative one subjects it some sort of an A/B test to understand and establish the TAT & UX parameters testing it with real-time and with the targeted audience and demographics as desired.
Application to Processes & Workflow
Supposing there was a product team exhibiting these metrics over a two-quarter time span:
Would there be a necessity to change or introduce anything in the workflow or add / remove some processes there?
Well, the shipping cadence overshooting by 200+% over a 30-day period in the Month 3 may surely deserve an explanation as the leadership would demand & of course CHURN hitting a high of 16% being an obvious red mark.
But getting into a much greater detail, just suppose they were following Agile Scrum, just the basic process with the daily standups, iterative development, focused on shipping regular periodic releases with no frills attached. Assume a new VP gets hired and he suggests the team changes from Agile Scrum to Kanban given how he has had some runaway success with it earlier at his previous work place and also how the team here is experienced now and it is seen as a best fit given how there is a need to look ahead into the future.
What should the team do? Should the team blindly adapt?
Well, that’s perhaps a place where “less is enough” could work out to be absolutely great. And that idea ought to be presented abundantly clearly to the VP whilst also putting in an honest effort in a genuine attempt to understand the motivations behind the suggested change in process. Most leaders would appreciate it given their onus on the alignment & their ownership if the team got back to them with a solid reasoning, even if that happens to translate to some kind of a pushback in a way.
Application to Strategy
Given the onus product teams ought to have on strategy and the clarity that teams are expected to operate with, it could end up being entirely fuzzy and totally opposite in reality. When an unwavering / unshakable strategy is a total myth, the importance ought to be on getting to a desired level of clarity so as to sort out and clear up the path as much as possible and then to have alternative plans ready to be deployed to cover for any edge cases that may arise dynamically.
Supposing a product team at a healthcare organization is thinking about offering more protection to its users who are critical Type-II Diabetes cases, making them more aware and less prone to any sort of damage unforeseen. So, here are a few details they have SPECed out.
implement a flag / alert (via a notification / buzz) to the users / patients who are diabetic & critical as soon as it picks up the utterance of words correlating to food (or) direct use of the word sugar (or) has sugar associated with it in some way
integrate an NLP interface into the app alongside an active listener so as to allow the users to have a seamless experience with no interruptions occurring due to false positives over reading something from a book or quoting the word “sugar-free” for instance
furthermore, to interpret spoken words that directly or indirectly translates to the word “sugar” from any language is also pretty much desirable to reach to a level as shown here in the screenshot
Baking all these desired features into the latest release so as to be able to justify the strategy becomes absolutely mandatory sans which the effectiveness of the feature may get diluted and the App may lose out on capturing a potentially strong opportunity in the market.
So, does the logic “less is enough” apply here over this parlance?
No, it does not.
There’s an imperative need to have a degree of clarity over the strategy and if one ends up defining “what we are doing now” very vaguely, the teams are just going to struggle with understanding the goal and they may not be able to move the needle over the metrics by even a minimal margin.
Less is definitely NOT enough in some parlances that have to do with strategic work / strategizing and that ought to be perfectly fine given how there’s a burning need to align teams over giving them a download of the outcomes & setting expectations.
Suggested reading:
Less is Enough: On Architecture and Asceticism by Pier Vittorio Aureli
Pier Vittorio Aureli. Lecture "Less is Enough" at Strelka Institute