What does it mean that operational elegance?

An elegant operational system accomplishes a lot with very little complexity.

Example: Your task management system used to involve a project manager with subtasks, tags, priorities, due dates, and recurring review cycles — forty-seven active items on any given day. You replaced it with a single plain-text file containing three sections: Today, This Week, and Waiting. Each morning you move items between sections in under two minutes. Six months later, your project completion rate is higher, your stress is lower, and people ask you how you stay so organized. The system does not look impressive. It looks like a text file. But it handles your entire operational load with a kind of quiet precision that the forty-seven-item system never achieved.

Try this: Select one operational system you use daily. Write down every step, tool, and decision point it currently involves. Now redesign it with one constraint: every component must serve exactly one purpose, and every transition between components must feel frictionless. Eliminate anything that exists because it might be useful rather than because it demonstrably is. Run the redesigned version for one week and evaluate it on two criteria: does it produce equivalent results, and do you enjoy operating it more? If the answer to both is yes, the redesign is more elegant.