I was catching up today on my stack of Harvard Business Review. The February issue (yes I am a bit behind) has an article, The Biosphere Rules. I would like to share a few nuggets from the article, as it articulates in detail something I Tweeted about in July:
- There are over 100 elements in the periodic table, and a varying combination
of ONLY SIX of them comprise over 99% of all living things - The earliest multi-celled organisms have spawned between 30 and 100 MILLION
species today (if you believe in evolution and not creationism)
The author’s position for the article is in reference to sustainable development. While I am all for that, what struck me is this really applies to a multitude of businesses, and ideas. How? Please read on.
Think about Microsoft Windows. How much of the code do you really use, yet how much complexity was built into it? Same story if you run an IT infrastructure… think about your monitoring solution and how bloated it may be.
At my last job, we discovered that while there were over 3,500 potential monitoring alerts, the top 25 comprised 35% of the total possibilities. By the time you hit the top 100 alerts (just 3% of the total) we were well into the top quartile.
If a combination of six elements can create over 30 million (to err on the conservative) species and comprise 99% of all living things, I think we learn from that? Have we gotten too complex for our own good? How can we make things simpler?
Here is a suggestion as a start…. Ask yourself three fundamental questions, as you evaluate tools, companies, partners, applications, etc:
- Is it useful
- Is it relevant
- Is it simple
There is elegance in simplicity.
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