Complexity is Easy

I saw a post on LinkedIn begin with this statement recently. Complexity can be challenging if you don’t have a lot of experience taking action in complex environments. Most people believe that simplicity is preferable to complexity (it often is), but I think this desire to reduce everything to “simple” often causes more complexity to arise.

In software, for example, complex interfaces allow us to perform powerful operations. Those used to having a lot of control can often be frustrated when companies simplify and remove optionality. They might be attempting to make it easier to use for newer users, but doing something like simplifying interfaces from text to simple iconography, or moving features around to make the interfaces feel “less busy” can make things harder to understand and can lead to accessibility nightmares as well. Hiding less-used advanced features under multiple menus make advanced operations take more time to accomplish. Simplified interfaces often punish power-users.

Notion’s probably the best place where I encounter this regularly. Often when the interfaces are redesigned to accommodate beginners, operations that took four keyboard interactions balloon to eleven. The visual design may be more pleasant, but the underlying interactions suffer. When you design for simple, it can be easy to malign advanced pathways as you focus on the ideal path for the new customer. The long-term customers often are forced to relearn a new way of doing the work, creating complexity in education and change-management as well.

TL;DR: I really don’t like this idea that “complex bad, simple good.”

That doesn’t feel like an observable truth to me. But lately I’m practicing sitting with statements that make me furrow my brow, such as the take above. I can take a statement like this and look at it from both the author’s perspective and my own. I’m enjoying this new form of polarized ranting where I’ll rant as if I both agree and disagree—because I do—everything’s a paradox.

“Complexity is easy”

“Complexity is easy” makes no worldly sense to me.

My hot take for the week is I’m exhausted by interfaces and experiences designed by those terrified of complex (and sometimes even just plain complicated) systems. The experiences are friction-filled and inelastic because the incurious desire “simple” solutions for everything.

Sitting in the discomfort of unknowing is the hardest thing we do. Figuring out how to act in complex environments is how we learn and grow. It’s also fucking hard. Yet it’s what sets apart innovation from maintenance. Building complex systems that allow for elasticity and being comfortable with adapting to emergent behaviour is scary. Yet life happens at the edges.

“Complexity is easy” makes so much sense to me.

It’s easy to let things fall as they may, and take small iterative actions to see what happens. Maybe something notable happens in the observation. Perhaps not rigidly applying process to everything allows you to see growth arise from the decay. It’s easy because I don’t have to think about it and it can easily become someone else’s problem without too much effort.

“Simple is hard”

“Simple is hard” makes no worldly sense to me.

Making a simple solution is not hard. By definition it’s reductive and boring and only solves a narrow slice of communal need. It only does one thing and does it well. It’s easier to compartmentalize than to think about larger systems.

“Simple is hard” makes so much sense to me.

It’s very challenging to produce a simple solution that cuts through the complexity (uh oh, I think we’re seeing the paradox of the quote now) and focuses on the “meat” of what makes connections challenging or makes a complicated system more approachable.

I think people really struggle with complexity because we believe that everything can be simplified. So when things aren’t simple, people are paralyzed. When a system is complex, the best thing we can do is take small dousing action to identify opportunity. Build sub-systems for testing aspects of the system.

Often there’s no way to “reduce the complexity”, only to sit in the discomfort of not knowing what action is right and figuring out how to act anyway. Or just admitting that everything is complex if you look at it from the right perspective. And that that’s pretty wonderful.