The Myth of Easy

By Taz Lake

Over the last couple of decades, complexity across work, life and technology has increased.  While the emergence of new technologies has simplified life in many ways, it has brought work and life closer together as never before.  This leads to surprising outcomes in the way we perceive complex scenarios which impacts our judgments and risk-taking. Now technologist, project manager, and entrepreneur Taz Lake draws on over 20+ years of experience to explore this concept through stories, examples and industry research. Through his thoughtful - and sometimes irreverent - approach he reveals insights into why we may be impacted by this gap in vision and how we may be able to use it to our advantage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Taz Lake
• Release date: May 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386323211

Taz Lake

Taz Lake is a technologist, writer, educator and advisor.  He has been involved in technology strategy and implementation for over two decades and has served multiple Fortune 500 companies.  He has been published online in the Huffington Post, Advertising Week and CMS Wire. Taz earned an MBA from Georgia State University with a concentration in Information Systems.  He also holds an additional MA from Wheaton College for Intercultural Studies and Communication, as well as an undergraduate degree from Duke University.  He lives in Atlanta with his wife and daughter. 

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Preface

Complexity in today’s world is unprecedented.  This is true whether you are talking about business, work, projects or technology.  Underestimating complexity leads to failure, often on a grand scale.  Unfortunately, a prevalent consumer mindset allows us to easily underestimate complexity, wrongfully believing we can accomplish feats based on the experience of others.  We oversimplify as our perception of complexity is skewed by various media forms.  We ignore the path dependence of success.  We use shorthand to jump to conclusions without attempting to understand the whole, all the while making expensive mistakes.  With business workspaces becoming more integrated with consumer spaces due to technology, a consumer decision making mindset flows into business over the bi-cultural bridge that is formed.  This flow introduces risky decision-making practices based largely on emotion while an erosive mindset prevails:

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It shouldn’t be that hard

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An acknowledgement of this Myth of Easy will help us identify these patterns in ourselves and others so that we may better handle them as our worlds of work and life further integrate in the 21st century.

Make it Easy 

It was a standard day at the company where I worked.  Getting new projects off the ground, even a required compliance project, was by no means easy.  We didn’t really have a process in place to do it, merely a series of gatekeepers who would sign off depending on how expensive the project.  There was no project management office to help, there was more art than science and starting a project was not very repeatable.  Even if we did have those organizations, every compliance project faces the challenge of making compliance an auditable reality, and they become more about the strategy around compliance and how to comply with the least effort. 

Still, a group of us had to go through key stakeholders to get approval.  We got a meeting with one of the key stakeholders for approval.  We will call him George.  We strolled into George’s office with a strong value proposition.  There was a need to comply with a new set of regulations.  As a result, this was not an optional project.  We also tried to build the case around using a platform approach to promote reuse for future initiatives like this one.

George’s first question was Will this make my job easier? After some arm-twisting I guess the answer was yes because we got the funding.

Now this was a curious question to me at the time.  I read a lot about usability and making websites easier to use.  That was my job at the time after all, and software usability is still an interesting topic to me to this day.  The question, and the answers to such a question, came across as problematic.  So, for that project, we had to set out to arrive at measurements