Ted Talk Tuesday: How Too Many Rules at Work Keep You From Getting Things Done

For the past few years, Yves Morieux has been plagued by two unresolved enigmas: Why is productivity so disappointing in all the companies where he works? And why is there so little engagement at work?

There’s a good chance everyone reading this has felt detached from their work at some point. Despite all the affiliation events, the celebrations, the people initiatives, the incentives and the leadership development programs to train manager on how to better motivate their teams, people continue to feel disengaged, acting against the interest of their company.

In a society where most of us spend the majority of our time at work, why is this sentiment so common? Morieux believes it’s because the workplace is becoming increasingly and dizzyingly complex. We’re talking about all of those strategies, structures, processes, systems, KPIs, scorecards, committees, headquarters, hubs and clusters shoved in our faces day in and day out—and Moriuex thinks these things create unnecessary complicatedness in an organization.

To resolve these enigmas, Morieux suggests we start focusing on the nervous system of an organization—the connections, the interactions, the synapses—instead of the skeleton of boxes. And to soften the complexity, to enhance the nervous system, Morieux created what he calls the “smart simplicity approach.” It follows six simple rules:

1 Understand what your employees actually do.

“What is their real work? We need to go beyond boxes, the job descriptions, beyond the surface of the container, to understand the real content.”

2. Reinforce integrators.

“Integrators are managers that you reinforce so that they have power and interest to make others cooperate. How can you reinforce your managers as integrators? By removing layers. When there are too many layers, people are too far from the action, therefore they need KPIs and metrics—they need poor proxies for realty.”

3. Give more people more power…

“The real key to performance is combining cooperation with autonomy. By creating new layers and processes and systems to deal with everyday challenges, you also sacrifice people’s autonomy. That makes the organization less agile.”

4. …and take away resources from everybody.

“Having fewer resources mean people have no choice but to rely on each other, which helps to foster cooperation.”

5. Make sure your employees eat their own cooking.

“People work better when they understand—and have to live with—the consequences of their actions.”

6. Don’t punish failure—punish the failure to cooperate.