I’m a most rational person, naturally defiant of mysticism, the supernatural, and fairy tales. Yet I’ve reluctantly come to admit that, to outsiders, what I do often passes for magic.
What I do, seen from the outside, is this: I plop down in the middle of a complex business problem, full of moving parts and complicated mechanisms, and after just a few minutes, asking just a few questions, I turn it into something infuriatingly simple and obvious.
It feels like a magic trick: one minute there’s this giant Rube Goldberg contraption, tall as a building, hissing and grinding and clanking and stomping. Maybe it’s an intranet portal. Maybe it’s a purpose-built data management system. Maybe it’s a multi-step business process. No matter. I ask a question or two, I make a couple of simple gestures with my hands, and suddenly, where the contraption stood, there now is a clock. Or a hand drill. Or just a bell. And it works. It works well. It does the job at hand, perplexingly better than the big machine ever did. And the most upsetting thing is, you can’t remember why you thought you needed the big machine in the first place.
It’s not quite always this quick, or this drastic, but this is what happens in probably two thirds of the cases where I’m brought in to reinvent an app, a business process, or a customer experience. For enterprise apps…
