Companies have long used simplicity to improve what they do. The best example comes from the factory floor, where lean practitioners use the backplane of process simplification to take out waste and improve productivity and quality. It’s here where the simplification toolbox is most fully developed.
Lean’s methodology and tools are simple (in the straightforward sense, not the easy sense). To simplify operations, they find waste and eliminate it. But simplicity is not that simple, and neither is lean.