IT SHOULDN'T BE THAT COMPLICATED

But of course it is complicated because people, who are the mystery ingredient, manage to screw it up. That’s why Jack Welch at General Electric was so keen on trying to computerise the customer interface….complete madness as nearly everyone I know would rather deal with a real idiot than a perfect computer.

Recently Russell Brand was doing a gig and reportedly, as the saying goes went “off on one”,  as he does. No one knew where his lament about modern life was going, least of all one suspects Russell, but he concluded that in the midst of modern life his cat still didn’t realise the internet existed.

Which is a shaft of brilliance.

In the techno-muddled-see-you-on-the-cloud life of today our clever pets are immune to the fibre optic stress the human race is struggling with.  And then I was struck down with a nasty dose of humility as I watched Welsh sheep farmer Kate Humble (and “humble” was an appropriate name) visiting the Wakhi people of North East Afghanistan. Hard lives, tough farming, life expectancy 35, 20% of babies die before the age of one, diet mostly rough bread and milk or a cheesy ball unappetisingly called “krut”.

Asked whether he saw this hard lifestyle would continue, the reply from a local farmer was splendidly candid and articulate:

“What else can we do? We are illiterate and we need to earn money to survive. This is hard but it works”.

And it did, with a brilliant welfare system of looking after each other and with work being described as “having something to do”.

Who are we to judge pets or humans when they make their own way with such resilience and independence of spirit? And what struck me strongly was, no, not a yearning for krut but a desire for simplification. All the news is about complexity, vested interests and what the Wakhi farmer called “bad stuff”.

Ron Ashkenas of the management consultants Schaffer preaches the need to simplify and does so with passion. But it isn’t easy because the more sophisticated people get the more Byzantinely complex are their solutions. I sometimes think HT and IT combined are the architects for long cuts in life and spiders’ web thinking leading to great debate and greater inaction.   It takes crisis and simple objectives, like survival, to force issues like simplicity and I heard it on a charity appeal on Radio 4. The idea was send a cow to the poor of Africa. The idea of a cow =a trade-able asset generating regular milk and therefore cash flow is simple.

And as they applauded “simple solutions to tough problems.”

Solutions that, say, cats would understand.

And as it’s put on my website “I like cats because they know where they are going”.

Which is more than you can say for most of the rest of us.

www.colourfulthinkers.com