The Eye of the Storm

Posted by Mouyyad Abdulhadi on Apr 30, 2010 in Guest Post | 0 comments

Jason Fried’s, CEO of 37Signals, message is easy to comprehend, “Everything is simple until you make it complicated.”

When thinking about our businesses or projects we tend to think ahead of ourselves. We try to spend as much money as we can, accumulate many resources, get many people involved and all that does is create chaos.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, yet we constantly try to add curves.

An entrepreneurs mind is a whirlwind of ideas. The difficulty comes in when we try to implement those ideas. The whirlwind becomes a hurricane. We see paths, intersections, parallel lines, curves…

Applying design thinking helps the entrepreneur, business owner, employee reach the eye of the storm, the calmest center-point of the hurricane. Design thinking is already defined for us (on wikipedia), we have to learn how to use it to reach that eye of the storm.

We brainstorm, pick a path, and execute. If the path chosen was not the correct one then we adapt, we change paths and execute again, and repeat as needed until we reach B from A.

When something seems difficult, it must be stripped down to the bare minimums and attacked again. If something is complicated then we must try to simplify it. Adding more when less suffices can be the early signs of failure.

Simplify.