Three Ways of Invent and Simplify

I was talking to another manager about how to think about Invent and Simplify in problem solving, it occurred to me there are three ways we can tackle recurring problems: 1. The busy worker way: the busy worker get things done by working hard and repeating the same old process again and again. They maybe busy, and know a lot of how "things" work, but they are not necessarily productive. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Einstein famously said. But many of us, including myself, fall into this trap far too often. 2. The process optimizer way: these are the folks who do not accept the status quo, instead they optimize the process of doing the same things again and again. For example, instead of doing A, B, C and D sequentially, they find ways to do B and C in parallel. Through process optimization, they could improve the productivity quite drastically. Adam Smith observed that "ten workers could produce 48,000 pins per day if each of eighteen specialized tasks was assigned to particular workers but a worker would be lucky to produce even one pin per day". This is the power of process optimization through Division of Labor and Specialization. 3. The technical innovator way: technical innovators try to solve the problems using technology break through. Instead of repeating the same old like the busy worker, or the process optimizer that get things better typically within the same system, technical innovators think outside the system. They may replace human labor with automated or semi-automated machines. Sometime they may even change the nature of the problem completely. For example, KMS used to enforce a quota on the number of concurrently active resources that could be encrypted under the same KMS key. It was a recurring pain for customers who needed to run large database clusters with KMS encryption. Through our engineers' brilliant innovation, "we ... remove this quota entirely and this error message no longer exists. With this quota removed, you can now attach unlimited grants to any KMS key when using any AWS service." The moral of the story: be mindful about being a complacent busy worker, try to spot optimization opportunities in the existing process, but every now and then, get a technical innovation - instead of playing along the old game, change the rule of the game, play your own game!