Simple Does Not Mean Unsophisticated

Simple Does Not Mean Unsophisticated

My wife had sinus surgery yesterday.

Everything went swimmingly well.

Before the procedure, her surgeon explained what was going on, what he was going to fix and roughly how long it would take.

I’m paraphrasing, but the conversation was essentially:

Here’s the problem.

Here’s what I’m going to do.

I’ve done this thousands of times.

She’ll be out in about an hour.

Simple.

Understandable.

And absolutely nothing about what he was actually going to do was simple.

He didn’t make me carry the complexity

The procedure involved stuff I don’t know anything about, specialized equipment, specialized techniques, skill and judgment developed over thousands of procedures.

It was completely beyond my domain.

He could have explained this procedure with great detail and complexity.

But he didn’t.

He provided an explanation that was simple enough for me to understand.

The complexity of what he was going to do hadn’t disappeared.

He simply didn’t make me carry it.

Complexity isn’t sophistication

We sometimes confuse complexity with sophistication.

If something is difficult to understand, filled with technical terminology or requires a lengthy explanation, it can feel sophisticated.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it’s just complicated.

I’ve always admired people like Milton Friedman and Warren Buffett for almost the opposite reason.

Both dealt with extraordinarily complex subjects – economics, markets, capital allocation, incentives, risk and human behavior.

Yet both had a remarkable ability to make sophisticated ideas very understandable.

They didn’t do that because the subjects were simple.

They understood them well enough to identify what mattered.

That may be one of the under-appreciated characteristics of expertise.

Complexity can demonstrate how much you know.

Simplicity can demonstrate how well you understand it.

Seek the simpler model

One of my graduate-school professors, Fred Bell, had a phrase that has stayed with me for more than thirty years:

Seek the simpler model.

Not the simple model.

The simpler model.

That distinction matters.

Sometimes the problem requires complexity.

Add another variable.

Account for another interaction.

Use the more sophisticated method.

But every additional piece should be there for a reason.

If two approaches adequately explain the evidence and defensibly answer the question, why choose the more complicated one?

That’s parsimony.

And parsimony isn’t indiscriminate subtraction.

It’s disciplined reduction.

The objective isn’t to remove as much as possible.

It’s to identify what is essential.

Preserve what contributes.

Remove what doesn’t.

Complexity should have to earn its way in.

Sometimes it really is complicated

There’s a popular idea that if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

I’ve always struggled with that.

Sometimes it’s true – but not always.

Some problems are genuinely complicated.

There are interactions that matter.

Qualifications that matter.

Uncertainty that matters.

Details that cannot be removed without changing the answer.

If those things are necessary, they stay.

Removing them doesn’t make something simple.

It makes it simplistic.

That’s where disciplined reduction matters.

Simplicity isn’t about removing complexity until something becomes easy.

It’s about understanding something well enough to know which complexity is necessary and which isn’t.

Simplicity by design – not simplification by omission.

Don’t make me understand the microchips

Think about an iPhone.

Tap an icon.

Take a picture.

Call someone.

Send a message halfway around the world.

Remarkably straightforward.

Underneath that experience are processors, memory, sensors, networks, software and transistors doing things most of us couldn’t begin to explain.

The complexity didn’t disappear.

Someone did the work of managing it.

A sophisticated solution doesn’t necessarily require a complicated experience.

The person making the phone call shouldn’t have to understand the microchips.

Open Box doesn’t mean dumping out the box

The same principle applies to information.

Transparency matters.

But transparency doesn’t mean showing everyone everything all at once.

Start with what someone needs to understand.

Then let them go deeper.

What assumptions did we make?

Show me.

How did you get there?

Let’s look.

What else should I know?

Here it is.

Open Box doesn’t mean dumping all of the contents onto the table.

It means nothing important is hidden inside it.

That’s simplicity by design too.

Make what matters understandable.

Preserve the sophistication underneath.

Make the complexity available when it matters.

For lack of a conclusion…

There’s nothing inherently sophisticated about complexity.

And there’s nothing inherently unsophisticated about simplicity.

Sometimes sophistication is what makes simplicity possible.

It takes understanding to identify what matters.

It takes judgment to recognize what doesn’t.

And it takes discipline to know the difference.

That applies to models.

Products.

Processes.

Explanations.

Decisions.

Almost anything we create.

Parsimony isn’t the pursuit of simplicity for simplicity’s sake.

It’s the pursuit of what is essential.

Seek the simpler model.

Use the complexity the problem requires.

Remove what doesn’t contribute.

Preserve what does.

No more complex than necessary.

No simpler than defensible.