The Pencil People

Not long ago, when the space race was at its peak between the then two superpowers there was this factious story doing the rounds about how NASA spent millions of dollars trying to invent a pen that would write in zero gravity conditions, while their counter parts in USSR just used a pencil which was much cheaper and easier to get.

Fisher Space Pen Company Inc.  an American company eventually  engineered a simple pen which was  used  since a pencil had its own challenges of breaking of lead tips and potential fire hazards with its inflammable material. Though factious the story enlightens us to believe there is always scope to find simple solutions to problems, the simpler the solutions the easier it is to implement them.

Business leaders today would die for solutions that provide them just two alternatives to choose from, preferably a YES and a NO. While these utopian choices are far from the reality of today’s complex business environments most challenges we face today are of our own doing,   as we fall for things we do not really need, leading to our spin of how simple gets complex and how complexity cannot be simple for us.

It’s difficult to undo everything done in the past but advanced analytics today holds the ability to convert & define complex environments as simple – straight- forward- problems.  When problems will be straight forward solutions too will be simpler to find

It is now up to the practitioners of advanced analytics to decide which side of the space war they would choose to be, the pen or the pencil people.