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AfA Special
Features
26
Forward Magazine
Q
Summer 2016
Airforwarders Association
I
t is said that it's the simple things
which make life comfortable. While
at first sight this proposition sounds
like the priggish rediscovery of a luxurious
habit of modern modesty – cabbage
instead of caviar, at least for the crowd
– you may easily detect an element of
truth in it: Whoever makes it his business
to find a simple solution to a problem
instead of creating a complex puzzle of
hopefully corresponding partial solutions
has a hard row to plow. Although pleading
and searching for simple solutions doesn't
necessarily make one's life easy. On the
contrary. Simple is outrageously hard, it
frequently costs a lot of blood, sweat and
tears – and needs an incredible amount
of persistence.
Looking at our business, an appropriate
example of how to solve fundamental
problems the simple way instead of
making use of complex structures, is the
invention of the wheel (and before that the
hammer and chisel). The wheel has made
human life more agreeable and easier by
simplifying the movement of goods from
A to B. But it was a long and winding road
to get there since a variety of conventional
and established but simultaneously
laborious and lavish procedures already
existed and needed to be overcome. And
more than a few people earnestly tried to
improve these old-fashioned techniques
rather than looking for superior and
simpler solutions.
“If I had asked people what they
wanted, they would have said
faster horses."
– Henry Ford
The point is to improve and facilitate the
future, and to discard things which have
become outdated and do not have any future
at all. Complexity can be nothing more than
the sum of numerous components which in
practice have proven to be either redundant
or – even worse – counterproductive.
I could have done that myself
The ingenious part to a simple solution
is – in retrospect – always so obvious
and close. “I could have done that
myself!" True! But I didn't. Unfortunately,
this point of view reveals another
fatal drawback: The determination to
downgrade the value of the solution itself
as well as its creator's achievement.
In many cases, it is still the case that only
visible complexity of a solution represents
perceived added value and therefor justifies a
higher price. If it's simple and looks simple it
simply cannot cost anything at all, or at least
not a lot, regardless how efficient it may be.
In fact the opposite is true: It is the plain,
almost invisible simplicity of a solution
which is worth not only the highest
level of appreciation but also the money.
Sometimes it's even priceless, because the
journey to simplicity may be incredibly
long. Reduction takes time.
“I didn't have time to write a
short letter, so I wrote a long
one instead."
– depending on source: Voltaire,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Mark Twain, Karl Marx,
Blaise Pascal
A software developer who dedicates
himself to the principle of reduction, in
other words simplicity, may finally present
nothing but a single button and no one
can tell that it is the result of hours, days,
sometimes weeks of hard work, endless
ideas, hope and desperation. But it is
exactly this simple single button which
represents the best, highly outrageous and
therefore most valuable solution.
Reduction makes solutions and their
usage easier, clearer, at the same time
automatically more user-friendly and – after
all – faster and more efficient. In a word:
perfect. What more can you expect?
By Christian Riege, Senior Vice President Software Development, Riege Software International
SIMPLE IS OUTRAGEOUSLY HARD
SIMPLE
VS.
COMPLEX:
n
COMPLEX SOLUTIONS ARE THE SUM OF UNEASY COMPROMISE
n