Amazon’s Leadership Principle “Invent and Simplify” sounds very glamorous until someone suggests solving a messy business problem by “just building an app.” That is usually the moment every process improvement person quietly puts down their coffee and starts looking for the nearest fire exit.
Not because technology is bad. Technology can be brilliant. A good system can save time, reduce errors, speed up communication and make the customer journey feel less like a treasure hunt with loading screens. But technology is not fairy dust. If the work underneath is messy, unclear or full of hidden handoffs, digitising it often just gives the mess a password and a monthly subscription.
For South African sellers, vendors, makers, importers and entrepreneurs, the pressure to “go digital” is real. Customers are buying through marketplaces, social channels and direct websites with growing confidence. Payments are becoming smoother. Delivery expectations are rising. A small business can look polished online before its back room has caught up with the promise.
A seller may have a beautiful product page, a clever social campaign and a payment link that behaves itself on the first try, but behind the scenes the product is still being packed on a table where three rolls of tape are missing, stock is checked by memory, and the courier collection depends on someone hearing the gate bell over a barking dog.
That is not a technology gap. That is a work visibility gap.
Invent and Simplify does not begin with asking what tool to buy. It begins with asking what is actually happening. Where does the work start? Where does it wait? Where does it get touched twice? Where does information disappear? Where does the customer feel the delay before the business understands the cause?
When a business reaches for an app before anyone has watched the work, technology can become expensive camouflage for confusion.
This is where Lean Six Sigma brings in a wonderfully practical habit called a Gemba Walk. In plain language, it means - go and look where the work happens.
Not where the report says the work happens. Not where the manager thinks the work happens. Not where the process map politely pretends the work happens. The real place. The packing table. The stock shelf. The courier handoff where small delays pile up like taxis at month-end.
Gemba is not a performance inspection. It is not walking around with a clipboard looking for someone to blame. It is the discipline of seeing the work with respect. You go to understand, not to pounce. You watch the flow, ask better questions and notice the small frictions that everyone has become too used to seeing.
That last part is important. People stop noticing the things they have normalised. The extra walk to fetch packaging. The repeated search for the correct product variant. The second check that exists only because the first check cannot be trusted.
After a while, the team stops calling these things problems. They call them “how we do it.” And that can be where unnecessary complexity starts charging rent.
Do not automate around the wrong thing
The danger of inventing too early is that you automate around the wrong thing. You build a form when the real problem is unclear product information. You buy inventory software when the real problem is that stock is not counted at the same point in the process every day. You add a chatbot when the real issue is that customers keep asking basic questions your listing should have answered before they paid.
Then everyone is confused. The business has spent money. The customer is still frustrated. The team now has an extra system to feed, which is delightful if your secret dream was to become a full-time zookeeper for admin creatures.
Before the app, check the bubble wrap.
That means look at the physical, human and information flow before reaching for a digital solution. Is the product easy to identify? Is the packaging ready before the order arrives? Is the customer’s delivery information complete before dispatch? If the answer is no, then a tool may help later, but the first invention is not software. It is clarity.
This is especially true in the South African marketplace because local businesses often operate in hybrid ways. A seller may receive orders through one channel, confirm details in another and dispatch through a courier process that sits somewhere between professional logistics and “my cousin can help if the collection fails.” It allows the business to move quickly, adapt to customers and survive the kind of daily curveballs that never appear in global case studies written from buildings with backup generators and indoor plants named after strategy frameworks. But flexibility without visibility becomes guesswork.
The Gemba question is simple: what do we think happens, and what actually happens? Those two are not always twins. Sometimes they are barely cousins.
The seller thinks payment confirmation happens immediately. In reality, one person checks the bank account twice a day, unless the school run runs late. The seller thinks stock is available because the spreadsheet says so. In reality, two units were set aside for a customer who has not paid yet, and nobody wants to release them because “she sounded very serious.” The seller thinks the courier collection is the final step. In reality, parcels sometimes sit near the door after collection time because the label was printed too late.
None of this means the business is careless. It means the work is human. Human work develops little bends, shortcuts and survival habits. Some are clever. Some are dangerous. The trick is knowing which is which.
Curiosity with purpose
This is where play and innovation matter. A Gemba Walk should not feel like the process police have arrived. It should feel like curiosity with purpose. What if we moved the packing materials closer? What if paid orders got one visible marker? What if the person answering customer questions could see stock status without asking someone else?
These are not grand inventions. They are small design moves. But small design moves can remove a surprising amount of customer pain.
The global giants are good at this because they obsess over flow. The customer clicks, pays, receives a confirmation, sees tracking, gets an update and knows what to expect next. The machinery behind that may be enormous, but the customer-facing lesson is simple: reduce uncertainty.
Local businesses can translate that lesson without copying the entire beast. In fact, this is one area where smaller businesses still have a genuine advantage. When a giant organisation discovers a problem in its flow, fixing it can take months or even years because the process touches multiple teams, systems and layers of approval. A small business can often spot the issue in the morning and test a better way by the afternoon. That agility is worth far more than many entrepreneurs realise.
Learn from the giants’ mistakes. Study where complexity creeps in, but keep your own operation grounded in practical reality. Fix the friction before you scale it. It is far easier to improve a process when ten orders move through it than when ten thousand do.
You can ask where parcels wait, even without a fulfilment empire. You can investigate why the wrong item gets packed, no need for an automated warehouse. You can understand why customers keep checking whether their order has moved without having to build a global dashboard.
You need to go and look.
Pick one point and simplify it
Look at one order from customer interest to delivery. Follow it like a detective who has read every Sherlock Holmes book. Where does it pause? Where does someone need to ask for information? Where does the team rely on memory? Where does the customer wait without knowing why?
Pick one point and simplify it. Not the whole business. Not the entire customer journey from the birth of e-commerce to the heat death of the universe. One point.
If parcels wait because packaging is not ready, fix that. If labels are printed too late, move the step earlier. If customers keep asking for delivery timing after payment, send the information before they need to chase.
That is Invent and Simplify at ground level.
It is not always a breakthrough. Sometimes it is a table moved closer to the shelf. It can be a cut-off time written clearly for everyone to see. Or it is one shared stock check that prevents three people from selling the same item with confidence and chaos.
This is the part we must not miss. Simplification is about making the work easier to trust.
When the work is visible, the team can improve it. When the process is understood, technology can support it. When the basics are stable, digital tools become useful instead of becoming another layer of confusion with a login screen.
That is how South African entrepreneurs can learn from the big brothers without losing local grit. The lesson is not “become a giant.” The lesson is “see the work clearly enough to design it better.”
Because the app will not save a process that nobody has bothered to watch. The new system will not rescue a handoff nobody owns. The clever automation will not fix a product flow held together by memory, hope and one roll of tape with commitment issues.
Before the app, check the bubble wrap. Check the shelf. Check the handoff. Then invent.
This is the way, not in the tool itself, but in the moment the business stops guessing and starts seeing.
This is a personal thought piece, written from my own customer experience and process improvement perspective. It draws on publicly available information and reflects my own views.