Strategic advice | November 2024 How can you minimize complexity while embracing growth?

These steps can help lay the groundwork for that change.

• Focus on objectives instead of processes. When your primary goal is the realization of outcomes—and not adherence to procedure—you can be more flexible in how you address complex, interrelated challenges. This move can streamline your operations by reducing complexity, such as lengthy chains of approval.
• Assign small, agile teams to each objective. Once you’ve identified your prime objectives, divide them up and delegate their management to teams that specialize in each. This will give your employees clarity and focus—simplifying the quantity and scope of their workload in a way that dramatically dials back complexity.
• Empower team managers with the authority to take decisive action. Deputizing trusted, competent managers to make independent decisions can help spot and neutralize seemingly small problems that can produce ripple effects that quickly swamp a complex system.
• Recalibrate executives’ roles to focus on communication and coordination. “The executive team should act as a sort of central nervous system that keeps lines of communication open between teams, coordinates the achievement of objectives in a way that creates business continuity, and reduces complexity at the macro level,” says Lepera. “Digital transformation combined with the smart delegation of non-core functions to external providers can help empower your team.”

Regardless of your industry, innovations in technology can help minimize complexity—especially when it comes to financial processes.

“Companywide systems that eliminate physical inputs in tasks like invoicing, payroll, and data entry help simplify your internal processes even as your staff and client roster expand,” says Lepera.

Implementing automated payments and receivables, for example, can help reduce paperwork, mitigate fraud risk, minimize human error, and better predict cash flow through real-time financial insights.

• In addition to paying vendors quickly and efficiently, automated payables help you maximize the use of available funds and reduce overdraft risks.
• On the receivables side, automation eliminates delays from check production and mail delivery, which helps reduce the number of days sales are outstanding.

“When a company is empowered with better data, they can apply payments with pinpoint accuracy and speed up realization on incoming payments,” says Lepera. “That can positively impact the cash conversion cycle, which creates free cash flow, which goes straight to the bottom line.”

Your Truist relationship manager can help you understand the best uses of automation in your financial processes.

With a more agile management process and digital payment solutions in place, you’re positioned to begin drawing up other customized strategies to reduce inefficiencies and clear bureaucratic hurdles. While the specific measures organizations use to streamline operations and shrink complexity vary, these tactics can aid almost every firm.

Upskill your employees. Escalating and resolving complex issues quickly is central to reducing complexity. Ensure your team members are trained on an ongoing basis with the skills and tools needed to identify problems and test and apply solutions that work.

Consider spinoffs and subsidiaries. Spinoff companies allow you to further horizontally extend your command structure by grouping teams and functions into a subsidiary with its own executive. That can help your team more easily coordinate its management efforts.

Schedule regular policy reviews and updates. Another term for adjusting your management approach to deal with increasing complexity is “creating a change program.” At the heart of that term is the idea that the customized management framework you’ll implement for dealing with change needs to be subject to change as well.

Applied to fit the overall context of your company, each of these steps is a procedural tool that helps build the autonomy, speed, and efficiency of your teams. They also increase the flexibility with which you can coordinate objectives companywide and decrease complexity across departments.

“You may have a management structure and legacy systems that make these changes easy, or ones that require a bit more effort and guidance to calibrate,” says Lepera. “But if you’re attempting to minimize complexity in the face of accelerated growth, working with professionals is going to help avoid the sort of excessive restructuring that can be its own source of complexity. Our advisors and strategists can help give you the coordination and clarity to ensure that whatever adjustments you implement fortify your ability to achieve long-term goals.”