Exercise 2 of the Playing With Purpose series
The Exercise
Pick something you do regularly, something you’ve been doing long enough that you have a process for it, a way you always go about it. Could be a work task, a creative routine, a way you structure your mornings, anything where you’ve developed your own system over time.
Now write down, as honestly as you can, every step in that process. All of them. The workarounds and the backup plans and the things you do because the original approach didn’t quite work, and the fixes you added because the workaround had its own problem, and the habit you built around the fix. Write all of it.
Then look at it and answer these:
The reflection questions:
- What were you originally trying to accomplish?
- If you were starting from scratch today, knowing what you know, what’s the simplest version of this?
- Which steps exist because of a problem you already solved?
- What are you maintaining that no longer needs to be maintained?
- What would it take to throw the scaffolding out and just do the thing?
What I Learned When I Did This
I was teaching Cinema 4D, which is 3D modeling and animation software, walking a group of students through a process I’d built and refined over time. And it was a process. I had been adding to it and patching it and working around its limitations and optimizing each individual step for so long that by the time I was near the end of it, I was about 126 workarounds deep. Each one had made sense at the time. Each one had been a reasonable response to a real problem. And together they had become a monument to accumulated complexity that had almost nothing to do with what I was actually trying to do.
I stopped mid-lesson. Just stopped.
I looked at the outcome I was trying to reach, which was a specific type of object with a specific type of deformation and a specific animation applied to it. Then I looked at what I’d built to get there. And then, I’m not sure I can fully explain this, something just clicked loose. I saw it. The original path. The one that had always been there, underneath everything I’d layered on top of it.
Create the object. Drop in the deformation. Create the animation.
That was it. Three steps. The whole 126-step process existed because at some point the simple version hadn’t worked, and I’d patched around the problem, and that patch had created a new problem, and I’d patched around that, and so on and so on until the scaffolding was so dense I couldn’t see the building underneath it anymore. But the building had been there the whole time.
I teach this story now because I think it’s one of the most universal things I’ve encountered in twenty-five years of working with students and designers and people trying to build anything. We are incredibly good at adding. We solve problems by addition. Something doesn’t work, we put something on top of it. And we keep going, we keep building, and we get good at managing the complexity we’ve created, and we forget that the complexity is something we chose. We mistake our own scaffolding for the structure itself.
You know where this showed up next in my own work? My blog image pipeline. I had built a process for generating and publishing featured images that, by the time I looked at it honestly, had ballooned to something like 127 steps in an automated sequence. And the manual version, the way a human would actually do it, was: take the prompt, ask ChatGPT for an image, do a quick critique pass, iterate two or three times, post it. Maybe eight minutes of work. All of that scaffolding had been built around a task that was naturally simple, and the scaffolding wasn’t making it better. It was making it slower, more brittle, and invisible to me in a way that meant I couldn’t fix what was broken.
This exercise is uncomfortable to do honestly because the scaffolding represents real effort. You built that. You spent time on it. Throwing it out, or even just looking at it clearly enough to see what’s load-bearing and what isn’t, feels like it devalues the work that went into it. It doesn’t. The work that went into it taught you the simple version. You couldn’t have found the three-step solution without building the 126-step one first. That’s the honest trade. It’s just important to recognize when the trade is complete, when you’ve learned what the complexity had to teach you, and it’s time to stop maintaining it.
The question I carry from this one, and I’d suggest you try carrying it too: what am I maintaining right now that I built around a problem I’ve already solved?
Playing With Purpose is a series of creativity exercises for people who want to understand and reclaim their creative capacity. You don’t need to be an artist. You need to be curious.
Further Reading
- Stage 3 in Design Thinking: Ideate (IxDF) — Ideation methods and creative exercises
- What Is Creativity? (IxDF) — Foundations of creative thinking
- What is Gamestorming? (IxDF) — Game-based ideation and creativity
