Tag Archives: Simplicity

Simplicity Wins But It’s Not Without Its Challenges

Picking up your kids from school shouldn’t be a pain in the ass…

One of my latest ventures is a solution to the “waiting for kids at school” problem all parents face. In the U.S. it might be a little different than in Mexico, but the problem is universal: all parents wait a long time to pick up their kids at school!

This is not a problem I have, but a friend of mine does. So, my buddy and I created On Time to eliminate this pain.

What’s the difference between crap and good enough?

What’s good and what’s crap? Why do celebrate crap? This is the topic of this week’s podcast, and a discussion on our journey through embracing crap making and coming out better for it.

I saying I repeat early and often is “Ok-ness is the enemy of greatness”. You see, most stuff that exists is good enough, and that goes for people too. 

When everything becomes a toaster less is more

Incremental innovation can have transformational effects, but we must also understand the limits of pursuing further efficiencies.

Yesterday, I came across a post on Gizmodo about everyday products that were improved to be perfect. Just look at them, I know you’ll want to have a few of them. Though none of them are Apple products, Apple is probably the one company that any of us can point to that makes us crave their products.

Why?

Any talk of recent breakthrough innovations usually start with the iPhone, iPod and iPad. Yet what many don’t know is that Apple invented neither of them. Rather they, with their own point of view, made them accessible.

There are many factors that go into innovation adoption, one of them is timing, the other is the one most don’t get right. Our adoption of Apple products had to do with more than one thing, but the fact that they’ve made our interaction with technology as simple and seamless as possible is a big one. Whether or not Apple understood this from the beginning, it’s no secret that people gravitate towards simplicity.

But most businesses and people go for its common enemy: simplistic.

Here are the main differences between the two:

New innovation challenge: From managing complexity to facilitating simplicity

A few weeks ago I did pitch to a startup accelerator about a project I want to start. This project has to do with social media monitoring, or in my language, “a sense-maker”.

One of the questions that was posed to me at end was: What will make this different?

My response: I aim to make this as simple as possible. (At the moment all I have is a mock-up, no live app)

Hold on, don’t leave yet. This is not a post about my idea, although it kind of is 🙂

The simple half step principle for innovation

There’s a very interesting article on the history of camouflage in the Atlantic. It profiles one of it’s leading innovators, Guy Cramer, and a new concealment innovation called Quantum Camouflage.

Though the history of camouflage up to today is very cool, there is a paragraph I want to highlight regarding Guy Cramer’s thinking about innovation.

Is subtractive thinking the new normal?

Creativity is subtraction

Apple is on everybody’s minds these days. Yesterday, along with my partner and new team member (@dario_rivera), I was talking to a client about a few observations we had about some processes in their restaurant operation and how we think they are creating bottlenecks.

Our conversation ended up being about how there seems to be a race towards simplicity. It seems us humans are hardwired to keep on adding stuff and quite scared of eliminating.

But when everyone competes on ‘out-featuring’ (adding) the other guy, your best bet is to do the opposite and subtract (reduce/eliminate) features. It’s not that simplicity is the new normal, it always is.