Our next management team meeting is in Istanbul. Our topic might be useful for you.

Istanbul inspired the focus of our meeting. We’re searching for simplicity.

Istanbul is a complex city. There are layers on top of layers. It’s old. It’s had lots of time to get complicated, and it’s had a steady stream of new people running the show.

It was established as a Greek colony, called Byzantion, in the 7th century BC. It fell to the Roman Republic in AD 196, and was known as Byzantium until 330, when it was renamed Constantinople and made the new capital of the Roman Empire. During late antiquity, the city rose to be the largest of the western hemisphere, with a population peaking at close to half a million people. Constantinople was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, known as the Byzantine Empire. That ended with the Muslim conquest in 1453. Constantinople then became the capital of the Ottoman Empire. — Wikipedia

Spend an hour in the Grand Bazaar, and you can see, feel, and smell the complexity. There are systems layered on top of systems. It’s a living, breathing, throbbing business organism. It works, but it’s chaos—organized chaos, but chaos nonetheless.

Istanbul and its complexity inspired our focus for the meeting.

Our topic? What should we stop doing? How can we simplify? What can we eliminate?

We need to simplify. You probably do too.

How Things Become Complex

Our typical response to a problem is to take action. Most of the time that involves adding something new to the mix.

We layer one solution right on top of the next. When the new system creates new problems, we create another new solution solving the latest issue. Layers on top of layers.

We add forms, processes, procedures, systems, and, sometimes, people. We end up with solutions that sometimes create problems worse than the issue that caused us to jump into action in the first place.

When all is said and done (and is it ever done?), we have a bit of insanity.

Example 1

Here’s a good example. Our expenses are up. We want them to go down. We get the bookkeeper to break out the expenses in more detail. We figure out that the snacks cost more than they used to. We create a graph of the snack expenses, assign someone to do all the purchasing, and find a couple of new vendors.

The next thing you know, we’re spending more on managing the “snack process” than we were on expensive snacks.

Of course, the snack issue is small. But it’s emblematic of what we do all the time. We do it in ways that have a much bigger financial impact.

It’s time to strip away the “solution” to the problem. It’s time to get down to the real issues and decide whether there’s a better way or whether we were better off with the original problem.

Example 2

Here’s another example. The firm wants more money and decides to try some advertising. I recently worked with a firm spending $750,000 plus per year on radio advertising. The ads work, and the phone rings off the hook.

The phone ringing means we need another intake specialist. She does a good job, so we need more lawyers. The lawyers do a good job, so we need more support people. Then we need management. Then we need more benefits to keep good employees, so we need more staff to help with human resources.

Keeping the clients happy is hard, so we added more lawyers, more people, more systems, and more complexity.

Stop…wait.

What happens when we net it all out? We figure out that we “solved” the money problem with layer on top of layer and that, when all was said and done, we had very little, if any, extra money.

Now Is the Time to Take Action

It’s time to strip things away. It’s time to stop doing. What can we simplify? What can we eliminate? What can we stop doing?

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We wander in the chaos of Istanbul talking about cleaning things up.

You don’t have to fly somewhere to go through this process.

You can do it at home. Keep it simple. Do it now.

Now is the perfect time. Soon, come New Year’s Day, you’ll be thinking about all the new things you want to do.

Now is the time to come up with your list of things that you’re going to stop doing.