The Simplicity Engine

A few months ago, ESPN published their predictions for the upcoming NFL season.

The sixth prediction: the Minnesota Vikings were going to win only four games this year and come dead last in the league.

Last week the Vikings surpassed ESPN’s expectations, winning their fifth game of the season.

The catch? The game they just won was their fifth game, full stop.

When analysts try to figure out why the - at time of writing, unbeaten - Vikings have confounded expectations, they usually point to Vikings defensive coordinator, Brian Flores.

Google Minnesota Vikings Defense, and you'll find articles describing his creative scheme in similar terms: Wild. Chaotic. Crazy.

Flores has flipped the script on modern football's relatively predictable defensive schemes: instead prioritising formations that appear to be one thing, then morph into another.

Impossible to read, attacking teams panic, errors are forced, and the Vikings regain the ball.

In a league where most coaches have seen it all, Flores' ability to surprise is rare.

Traditionally, American Football is a game of specialists.

With a 53-man roster, coaches prioritise players who excel in specific positions, and then craft plays to maximise each position group’s strengths.

Flores takes a different approach: prioritising generalists who can play multiple positions and building his scheme around them.

The result? Chaos. If any player can play in any spot at any time, good luck trying to figure out where each play is going to end.

The Vikings' success (they're now one of only two undefeated teams alongside last year's Super Bowl winners, the Kansas City Chiefs) raises a question: If this style of play works so well, why don't other teams try it?

The answer is complexity. If you play in the Flores way, you're asking a lot of your players.

Instead of relying on experts in the box for every decision, players must think on their feet. For most teams, it's simply too much to manage.

This is the Vikings real breakthrough this season: taking a very intricate system, and simplifying it for their players.

This is how Head Coach Kevin O’Connell described it:

"With the proper amount of structure, coaching and clarity that you can give these players, you can make the complex simple."

In essence, the Vikings have built a simplicity engine: a clear, repeatable way of making complex things achingly simple, allowing players to make key strategic decisions in split seconds.

This concept isn't limited to sports teams. It applies to everything, including businesses. Consider software that distils thousands of processes into a single click, a coffee chain that reduces getting a coffee to three words spoken to a barista, or a supermarket selling things that would once have involved a year-long voyage to procure.

What most companies sell (including, probably, yours) is simplicity.

Viewing companies as purveyors of complexity minimisation helps us not only be better servants to our users but to build better products full stop.

Here's how Mike Hudack, ex-Monzo CPO put it recently:

"The real art of product is understanding what people want to achieve, and helping them achieve that with the minimal amount of work."

This isn’t only because the easier something is to use, the more likely someone is to use it: but because when you’ve made whatever you’re building as simple as possible, you have the permission to go further.

For the Vikings, their foundation of simplicity gives players the freedom to play faster and more creatively. More deception. More energy. More chaos.

It's great to watch a commentator collapse in awe as what looks like a blitz package suddenly drops into a niche type of zone coverage, but this level of complex play is earned, not given.

The same principle applies to companies. When you see someone ship a great new feature or beautiful design, they’re generally only able to do this because they’ve done the work to take their core product and strip it to its simplest form.

Without simplicity, there's no room for creativity.

When you think of this it’s generally big companies that come to mind - SpaceX’s ability to launch a skyscraper into space and catch it with giant chopsticks being built on an approach of brutal simplicity to supply chain processes and manufacturing, or Costco’s ability to dominate on price due to their achingly simple business model - but it’s just as crucial for startups.

Once you've figured out what the market wants, instead of going straight to building more features on top of it, you’re probably best served by going back: doubling down on what works, and making it as simple as you possibly can.

So, perhaps it's better to talk less about building companies, and about building simplicity engines instead.

What complexities do we capture? How can we simplify them as much as is humanly possible? And in doing so, how many people’s lives can we make better.

Because, like the Vikings, we live in a world of complexity. And the way to win, the same.

Simplify.

aled@ashore.io