Ep 118: KYSS (Keep Your Systems Simple)

Written By Dustin Pead

Why Complex Systems Kill Creative Momentum

SUMMARY

The most powerful systems in your creative business aren't the complex ones with 17 steps and five different apps. They're the ones that you can explain to someone in under two minutes and implement tomorrow.

If you're proudly running what you call "comprehensive project management systems" that involve seven different apps, a 23-step onboarding process, and a flow chart that looks like a busy subway map, this episode is for you. While each component may have solved a specific problem over the years, chances are half your team is using workarounds and the other half is avoiding projects altogether because the system feels too overwhelming.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • ⚡️ The KYSS Principle: Keep Your Systems Simple - if it's not simple, it won't be sustainable

  • ⚡️ The Two-Minute Rule: Any system that takes longer than two minutes to explain is too complex for consistent adoption

  • ⚡️ User Satisfaction > System Sophistication: Focus on what your team will actually use, not what has the most features

NOTABLE QUOTES

  • 💬 "If it's not simple, it won't be sustainable."

  • 💬 "Consistency creates confidence - you can use that in any aspect of your life or creative process."

  • 💬 "Your systems should serve your creativity, not complicate it."

EPISODE RESOURCES

TRANSCRIPT

The most powerful systems in your creative business aren't the complex ones with 17 steps and five different apps. They're the ones that you can explain to someone in under two minutes and implement tomorrow. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast where we transform creative chaos into clarity. This is a podcast for all creatives, designers, photographers, writers, videographers, all creative entrepreneurs who are seeking practical and actionable strategies to grow their creative business through efficiency. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative process coaching consultant, and I help creatives know themselves, their process and their teams to create with efficiency as they scale together.

I'd love for you to subscribe, rate, review wherever you're listening or watching this podcast episode. We have new episodes that drop every single Thursday and some additional content released in between. If you're interested in any of the free resources that I mentioned in any of my episodes, you can go to dustinpead.com slash free. That's D-U-S-T-I-N P-E-A-D.com slash free. And you can follow me on social media channels at Dustin Pead. All right, let's dive into today's episode.

I want to start by asking you this and ask yourself, am I describing you? Is this you? Do you proudly own what you may refer to as some comprehensive project management systems? Do they involve seven different apps and a 23 step onboarding process and a flow chart that looks like a busy subway map for a major city? Has each component solved a specific problem that you've encountered over the years?

I'm willing to bet that half your team is using their own workarounds and the other half is avoiding projects altogether because the system feels too overwhelming to even navigate. You may have forgotten along the way the most important rule of systems. If it's not simple, it won't be sustainable.

So today I want to introduce you to what I call the KISS principle. No, not keep it simple, stupid. The KYSS. Keep your systems simple and replace your subway map with three core processes that every team member could explain and implement. Your project completion rate could probably increase by about 40 percent after you do this and you won't be working weekends to catch up on administrative tasks. So let's dive into the simplicity imperative.

Listen, complex systems don't fail because they're wrong. They fail because they're unusable. So let's break down the psychology of system adoption. People need to understand before they can implement. There's this cognitive load that increases resistance to adoption. You need to simplify systems that get used because complex systems get abandoned and that comes with some costs, right?

It comes with training time, multiplies with each additional step. Error rates increase exponentially with system complexity. You have maintenance that becomes a full time job just to maintain the systems. And this is why creative professionals resist complicated systems. Their creative minds prefer intuitive workflows, things they don't have to think too hardly about. Administrative burden kills creative momentum. Nobody wants to constantly be having to fix the system to use the system because complex systems feels like barriers to creative expression.

And this directly connects to our do versus due framework that the best systems create margin, not additional work. You can see more about that on dustinpead.com slash free. As productivity expert David Allen notes in his famous book, Getting Things Done, the best organizational system is the one you'll actually use consistently, not the one with the most features. This is why Apple has become so popular amongst creatives is because their systems are so simple to use. Anybody could figure it out. It's completely intuitive.

So let me share with you what I think are the four pillars of simple systems. They must include these four aspects. They must be explainable, memorable, repeatable, and scalable. All right, so let's start with explainable. This is what I implement, the two minute rule. If you can't explain your system in two minutes or less, it's way too complex.

Every team member should be able to teach it to somebody else. You should be able to hand it down the line. And the visual aids that you create should enhance it by simplifying it, not complicating the explanation. So that's number one, explainable.

Number two needs to be memorable. Sticky systems stick around. Simple as that. Sticky systems stick around. Use acronyms, alliteration, or memorable phrases like I use with the do versus due framework. Sounds like I'm saying the same thing, so you're immediately intrigued. It's not, it's D-O versus D-U-E, and I can explain that whole system in under 30 seconds. I've practiced it many, many times.

Another part to make it memorable is to connect new processes to existing habits. And you can do this by creating visuals or verbal hooks that make systems unforgettable. So we got explainable, memorable.

The third one is to make it repeatable. Consistency creates confidence. I'm gonna say that again. Consistency creates confidence. You can use that in any aspect of your life or any aspect of your creative process that repeatable processes and systems. It's consistency that creates confidence. It's the same process with the same outcome every single time and so if you can eliminate decision fatigue by standardizing common scenarios then you're gonna create consistency every single time. And with that, you're going to build in checkpoints that ensure quality without adding additional complexity.

So we've got explainable, memorable, repeatable. And the last one is make it scalable. Growth just because your business grows, which we all want, it shouldn't break your system. So you need to design for your future team size, not just for your current capacity. Keep that in mind. You always want to be designing your systems to be just about one notch larger than what you currently are and every time you notch up you need to readjust the system, keeping it simple. We'll talk about readjusting systems here in a little bit, but keeping them flexible enough to adapt but stable enough to rely on. Your systems should be able to be taught to new team members without extensive training.

So let's talk about this simplification process. Simplifying existing systems requires strategic subtraction, not addition. Creatives love to add things. We can do this, and we could do this, and we could do this, and what if this, and what if this. And next thing you know, you've got a 23 step process system with the subway map that we talked about at the beginning of this.

So I want to encourage you to audit your current systems. There's three ways I want you to do that, three steps really. Number one, I want you to list every tool, app, and process that you currently use. And I'm going pause right there for a second and say, if there are some that didn't make that list, but you know those processes exist somewhere, they're probably unnecessary. So clean out your SOP folder and get rid of it.

So first, list every tool, app and process currently in use. Secondly, I want you to identify overlap and redundancy and unused components. Where is this creating unnecessary friction? And lastly, I want you to measure the actual use versus the intended use. How is it actually being used and how was it intended to be used? Sometimes the best part of a system is right at the top to explain in one sentence, two max of what the intended usage should be.

So as you're going through your current systems with that audit, what would happen if you eliminated the least used components? If there's components as you're going through it, you're like, we kind of do steps one and two, but we don't really do steps three and four, but we definitely finish off with step five. Well, then three and four probably need to go away or be re looked at again, right?

So you need to create that system success criteria. And again, the way we do that is defining what success looks like before we build. We always begin with the end in mind. You want to measure the adoption rates, not the feature counts. How many people are actually adopting this system and using it? And you also want to consider user satisfaction over system sophistication. I'm say that again. User satisfaction is greater than system sophistication.

Again, this is where Apple separates themselves. You can tell I'm an Apple loyalist. That's where they separate themselves from Microsoft because they are more interested in user satisfaction, whereas Microsoft tends to be all about the system sophistication and what all it can do.

As design legend John Maeda explains in his book, The Laws of Simplicity, the simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. Knowing what to subtract is often more valuable than knowing what to add. What makes a great creative professional is a great editor. Knowing what to subtract away, what to leave on the cutting room floor, not to continually add more things in. We know it when we see it when we drive by a coffee shop and they're advertising how they now sell pizza. That's not good, right? We're like, hey, how about you get really good at coffee and not worry about selling pizza? I use that analogy all the time. And if you've heard this podcast before, you probably heard that analogy before. So I'm sorry. It sticks out my mind because I saw it once and I can never get rid of it.

Now let's talk about how to implement these simple processes without overwhelm. The transition to simpler systems should be simple too. Right. It shouldn't be overwhelming to take your processes from complex to simple. So let's talk about a gradual rollout here. We're going to implement one system at a time, not everything at once. You can roll out and cast some vision for a week or two. Then you can allow two or three weeks for adoption before you even add in the next component. You need to get team buy-in through early wins not through comprehensive overhauls.

And the way you do that, I love to do this in all my teams, is to promote adoption champions. This is somebody who is like super optimistic about everything. Once you know that you have the system the way that you want it and you've tested it against your skeptics, now it's time to promote the adoption champion. This is someone who's gonna embrace new processes naturally and let them be champions. Let them teach others rather than mandating the stuff from the top down. Let it come out horizontally sometimes, not vertically. And celebrate those early adopters. That'll create positive momentum.

Another aspect I want you to consider is to build in some feedback loops. No system is perfect. Every system has its flaws and it can always be getting better. But that doesn't mean we have to iterate so much that we don't understand what the system is anymore. So just build in some regular check-ins probably during that first month you want to look at like some weekly check-ins of the implementation during the beginning phases, right?

You want to create easy ways for team to suggest improvements maybe there's a comment section on your SOPs or if you're using a Google Doc that can drop a comment in there if you're using internal communications like teams or slack or whatever you can send that stuff right over create a channel dedicated to the new system and be willing to adjust based on that real world usage in your mind when you were simplifying the process, you're like, yeah, this is really all it needs. This would be great. But when the rubber hits the road, that might even still be too complex. And so you need to understand that your team members may come back and say, hey, look, the way we're actually using the system, we could probably even cut out another 20 percent of this to make it even more memorable, more explainable, more repeatable and more scalable.

So what are we going to do now? Well, how do we take this and run with it? Number one, I want you to conduct a system inventory this week. List every tool and app and process that your team currently uses, parentheses, or doesn't use, right? Identify which ones haven't been used in the last 30 days, right? Again, that's what I'm talking about. Maybe they're ones that exist that don't need to exist. And then want you to calculate the actual cost, the time and the money of maintaining each system component. Super, super important.

Number two. I want you to apply that two minute explanation test, right? You're going to pick your most important workflow process and you're going to time yourself explaining it to someone who's unfamiliar with your business. And if it takes you longer than two minutes, you need to identify what can be simplified or eliminated.

Number three, create your essential functions list. I want you to write down the five core functions that your system absolutely must perform every single time. And I want you to compare that list, get real ruthless and compare that list with your current system capabilities. And in that eliminate or consolidate anything that doesn't directly support those essentials.

Number four, choose one system to simplify this quarter, right? Start with the system that frustrates your team the most and apply the explainable, memorable, repeatable and scalable criteria. Test that simplified vision for a week or two before making any permanent changes. And make sure you communicate that this is a beta phase. This is a time for us to be testing it.

So many times leaders will unroll these process changes and their team, because they weren't communicated, will assume that this is the way it's gonna be now. If you can be ultra clear that, we're not settling here, we're just testing this. You need to reiterate that over and over again so that their expectations are clear.

And lastly, number five, establish some simplification standards. This is the criteria for evaluating all of your future systems. Require every new tool or process to pass this KISS test, the KYSS, keep your systems simple test. Make simplicity a core value for your team's operating principle.

Remember, you can find the templates and tools that support any of these processes at dustinpead.com slash free. I want to point out a couple of books that we mentioned in today's episode, the laws of simplicity by John Maeda, getting things done by David Allen. You can also check out my do versus due the DO versus DUE framework online at dustinpead.com.

So in conclusion, the most successful creative professionals that I work with, they're not the ones with the most sophisticated systems. They're the ones with the most sustainable systems. And sustainable systems are by definition simple systems. Remember, your systems should serve your creativity, not complicate it. When you keep your systems simple, you create space for what matters most. Doing your best creative work serving your clients with excellence start with just one system this week apply the kiss principle the KYSS Principle make it explainable memorable repeatable and scalable your future self and your entire team will thank you.

Next week in episode 119 we're diving into the beauty of completing. We're exploring how the simple act of finishing tasks and projects on time with margin creates a powerful dopamine cycle that propels your creative work forward. We're gonna look at why completion is often more valuable than perfection, and I'll share some ideas for building momentum through strategic finishing. If you've ever struggled with project completion or you find yourself constantly starting new things before finishing current ones, this episode will give you the tools that you need to break the cycle and discover the incredible freedom that comes from true completion.

Again, for more practical frameworks and free resources to help you move from creative chaos to sustainable clarity, visit dustinpead.com and follow me at dustinpead on social media. Get out there and create with clarity this week. We'll talk to you next time on Creativity Made Easy.

Dustin Pead
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Ep 117: Mid-Year Review