In Search of Elegance

Have you ever heard an idea, seen a object of art, heard a piece of music or read an advertisement and been stunned by its simplicity and elegance in hitting its target...you? Matthew E. May spent a decade as a close advisor to Toyota and holds that something is elegant if it possesses two things simultaneously: That the idea, product, etc. is unusually simple and surprisingly powerful. Think back again of that thing you thought of when you read the first sentence in this article. What was it that made it elegant to you? Was it something that was present or something that was missing? Many times what makes something elegant is what wasn't said, included, drawn or heard. Less is more applies here.

In his book, In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing, May believes that elegance is a subtractive process. It's not about packing as much in as you can but really boiling your message, product, service to its essence. Elegance also has other key attibutes like symmetry, seduction, subtraction and sustainability (read more here). How else could you apply this kind of thinking?

In your meetings: Talk less; listen more
In your presentations: Distill your message to its core; Make your point
In your style: Look in the mirror and whatever hits your eye first as "too much", remove it.
In your approach to solutions: Ask what do we really need to do here?

You get closer to elegance by NOT doing, including, adding...in other words resisting the temptation of adding just one more feature, one more chapter, one more color, one more revision, one more....

Stop

You must stop doing certain things that will make an elegant idea turn into something that is murky, undifferentiated, complicated and ineffective. Powerless.

I recently went through this with my new website. My old one had a ton of content which I guess was good for SEO but bad for anyone visiting. I soon came to feel it was crowded there and it lacked elegance and simplicity. I felt I was wearing out my visitors and they just went somewhere else. With my new site, I'm being more thoughtful about what goes there. I'm already looking to pare it down and swap out certain aspects of what is there. The feedback I got was that this new site was crisper, cleaner, fresher and more engaging...more contemporary. I forced myself to stop and really be thoughtful about what I put up there and how can it be simple yet powerful.

What do you have to stop doing? To get to that, you need to examine what you have to stop thinking. Perhaps we need to make our thinking more elegant in order to generate elegant solutions and ways of running our businesses. What assumptions do you keep making in your mind? Do you more often than not come up with more than the minds of your target audience is willing to read or listen to? Do they just get tired and shift their attention elsewhere? What could a shift toward elegance in your thinking create ifor you, your team, your decisions, your value?

What do you need to stop doing that would create a more elegant outcome, way of working, living...?