Firstly, I need to offer an apology. My life has gone through a number of massive, personal changes over the past few months and unfortunately this blog has fallen a little bit by the way-side. I’m not going to go into it more than that, and instead will get on with the post.. The following was something that I had started to draft up in early May.. enough chit-chat.

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In the guise of self-improvement I want to talk about one of my biggest professional flaws, something that consistently catches me out and something that I hope, in time and experience, I will eventually get under control. I overcomplicate things. In particular, I find that I often overcomplicate solutions or control recommendations, or spend too much time focusing on the unlikely events, and not on the more probable things.

I’m fortunate that I work with a group of guys who bring a whole different collection of experiences to the table, and have no problems with telling me when I’m being ridiculous. Sometimes it’s just the obvious thing that I overlook, or even just commenting on something I perceive as a likely event which is not actually that probable.

To formalise the process I’ve found that peer-reviewing risk assessments, or any other formal pieces of work, is a great mechanism, but generally getting other people to respond to review requests in a timely manner is a hit or miss. Either I’ll get something back immediately or it’ll take a few days. Usually if I have a risk chart or particular set of clarifying questions/statements on my screen I’ll just grab a colleague (timing this is important) and ask them for a few minutes of their time.

What I like about this is that in turn, they will ask me for feedback too, sometimes it’s simply to review an email before they click submit (“Do you think they will understand if I say this?”), but also in their documentation. So what we end up with is a spiral of peer-review, feedback providing a degree of normalisation and removing of the perhaps unnecessary crap or filler. (Maybe I need someone to do that on this blog).

I think my tendancy to overcomplicate things comes from my technical background. When I was at university my supervisor and lecturers would demand a certain degree of rigour out of the work that I was doing, and so it was in my best interest to pay attention to the smallest detail. This continued into my work with a resources company, and to a certain degree now in finance, but we’re expected to look at things more holistically now. Take a 10,000 foot approach instead of the up-close-and-personal approach. The lower-level details are filled in by other people. Doesn’t mean that I don’t look down into this detail and have a nit-pick. Perhaps this’ll impact me ever getting into management?

What are your tricks for keeping it simple?