Work Smarter: The Cocktail of Simplicity, Manageable Adversity, and Muntzing

Back in the 40s, TVs were giant, ugly behemoths. They were jammed with vacuum tubes, big bulky components, and were prone to overheating and failure.

Earl “madman” Muntz was an engineer and businessman who started repairing radios when he was 8 and built his first car radio when he was 14. As only someone with the nickname ‘madman‘ could do, when he worked in the TV business, he would walk around the factory floor, step in front of an unsuspecting engineer and yank components from TV sets until they stopped working. Then, he would put the last removed component back in and the set would often work, but with fewer components (thus cheaper) and often other benefits such as reduced heat.

This practice became known as muntzing, which while it sounds like some awful way of hazing people with a hosepipe, it was actually a deliciously simple exercise in efficiency and cost reduction. Rather unsurprisingly, this provides an interesting lesson we can apply outside of knackered, old TVs from the forties.

Simple but not Simpler

Muntz’ was fundamentally zoning in on simplicity as a way to accomplish efficiency.

He wasn’t the first. Around the same time period, Einstein, a man not especially unfamiliar with genius, said:

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Einstein touches on the elegance in simplicity and not to be fooled by thinking simple minds create simple things. We see this every day with seemingly simple devices (e.g. the iPhone) that carefully conceal enormous amounts of complexity behind the scenes, both in terms of technology and workflow.

For the work I do in building productive and engaging communities and organizations, this is nirvana. My ultimate goal is to build human systems that deliver solid, productive, and predictable results but are simple in their instrumentation and use. As you can imagine, there is often a lot of complexity that goes into doing this.

So, Muntz and Einstein give us a good recipe: focus on simplicity as a means to accomplish efficiency, and reduce the complexity as a means to become lean. Sounds great in theory, but how do we do this?

Harnessing Adversity to Build Efficiency

There are various reasons why things become inefficient: people get lazy and take shortcuts, complexity slows things down, too many layers of abstraction contribute to this complexity, people accept the new reality of inefficiency and don’t challenge it…the list goes on.

We see this everywhere in the products we build, the organizational methodologies we have in companies and communities, the systems we have to use to file our taxes or invoices, and elsewhere. Not seen this? Go to the DMV in America. You will get it in droves.

An effective way to create efficiency and optimization is when we have manageable adversity. That is, we face tough situations that are within our control, capability, and power to resolve and learn from.

Muhammed Ali said it best:

“I don’t count my situps, I only start counting when it starts hurting, when I feel pain, that’s when I start counting, cause that’s when it really counts.”

Our most difficult moments in life, when we can feel beaten down, tired, and lost, can be the most formidable times of personal growth, evolution, and development. If we therefore instill the right level of adversity into our work, complete with having the ability to resolve it (which is the key difference between adversity being a helpful thing or a discriminatory force), we develop efficiencies.

Putting This Into Practice

As such, there can be enormous value in deliberately injecting adversity into our work as a forcing function to get better results. In other words, sometimes the easiest path forward is not the best path if we want to increase our capability and creativity. Sometimes throwing a few obstacles people need to navigate can be a useful thing.

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