What would it look like if it was easy?

In ‘Atomic Habits,’ James Clear lays out four principles for breaking bad behaviors and adopting good ones. Could the anti-principles to those help us find problems worth solving with AI? No matter the type of change a company is looking to achieve (e..g, breakthrough, incremental), the antibodies for change will surely start attempting to neutralize the change agents.

Luckily, James' principles will help us find problems worth solving and lead us towards solutions that will stick: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying.

The cornerstone is making it easy. Most people I’ve met don’t go out of their way to overly complicate their day-to-day tasks, but how many times have you found yourself filling out duplicate forms/paperwork or processing reports that no one will read? 

Time has a sneaky way of injecting micro-doses of toil into so many processes. Basic tasks soon have step after step layered in. Add in a splash of “this is how it’s always been done” and soon enough you’ll have teams (and products) losing sight of what was, and could be, easy.

Thought starters for Innovation:

• Talk to your Help Desk staff and ask “what would it look like if managing these cases were easy?” 

• Call one of your customers and ask: What’s NOT easy about doing business with us?”

• Look around during the day for new business ideas — where do you see people standing and waiting, confused or frustrated? Ask, “what would that look like if it were easy?” 

Once you’ve locked into the pain points or heard what simple could look like, you can look at how other companies have solved similar challenges — whether it’s one-click purchasing like Amazon, hailing a cab like Uber, or check-ins like Disney. Each experience is surprisingly uneventful, but you can be sure there are complex data pipelines and automation underpinning it all.

With the ‘easy choice’ defined, making it attractive and satisfying should come easily. People will adopt the faster and smarter solution as long as you remember to get rid of those old clunky processes as well. Now, you can use this saying when hunting for ideas...

“If it ain’t easy, fix it.”