I am going to keep this short and sweet in honor of this week's rule, simplicity. Lately, this has been a hard rule for me to follow; I have been going through some creative process withdrawal. Typically, I like to:

Define: Go deep into the root of a problem
Research: Research how other people have solved similar problems
Create: Develop different concepts or ideas
Present: Deliver an excellent solution

Every company I have worked for has had a variation of this sort of creative process, whether they are in taking projects with creatives briefs or have a creative chain of command, somewhere along the line we lose the simplicity and really the beauty of design thinking. You see, the real value of design is creation—it is so simple.

People don't care why something looks a certain way, they care that is works for them. You don't wake up thinking, "Today, I am going to wear my green shirt because I have a stakeholder meeting and I want to make sure the attendees recognize that company's growth," you wear green because it's your color. Sometimes knowing the value of something and trying to justify the design thinking just creates a lot of extra complexity. We need to remember to Keep It Super Simple (KISS) and stop trying so hard to implement layers of process, it will only create a bottleneck. The KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore simplicity should be a key goal in design and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.

It is time for us to forget about legacy processes and refocus on creating a process that works. If a process isn't working then we "fail fast", move on, and try again.