Getting to Easy Can Be Difficult!

There's something counterintuitive about the best transformational work:

It can feel obvious.

That doesn't happen because it was simple or easy. It happens because it was right.

A lot of the time when you nail transformation, people often don't marvel at your genius.

They just... use it. It fits so naturally into how they work that it feels like it was always supposed to be there.

This used to bother me.

You spend months untangling a gnarly problem, navigating politics, building consensus, designing something that actually works—and the response is sometimes just "yeah, makes sense."

But I've come to see that reaction differently now.

When a solution feels obvious, it usually means two things happened:

- First, there was a real problem to solve. Not a manufactured one. Not a solution looking for a problem. A genuine gap between where things were and where they needed to be.

- Second, the solution was elegant enough that it didn't fight the organization. It worked with how people actually operate, not against it.

That lack of drama is not a sign the work was easy. It's a sign the work was good.

The complexity was in the diagnosis, the design, the navigation. The simplicity is in the result.

If you're doing transformation work and feeling under-appreciated because it all seems "too straightforward" in hindsight—you might actually be doing it exactly right.