CHAPTER 18

Complexity Is Out—Simplicity Is In

(Less Is More)

Vignette: It Is Too Complicated

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, an eighteenth-century French poet and critic, wrote, Ce que l’on conçoit bien s’énonce clairement et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.

Translated loosely, it means: “What we understand well we can explain clearly and the words to express it come easily.”

When people tell me, “It is too complicated to explain,” I think that they probably do not understand themselves what they are trying to “explain.”

As I review new business ideas coming from young entrepreneurs, I find that they often develop very complex systems, processes, or procedures, maybe hoping (falsely) that these complexities will protect their ideas from copycats. They forget that other people are intelligent too, if not more than they are. They forget that reverse engineering is quite common in business. They forget that in some countries, no trademarks or patents will protect their product from imitators.

Indeed, protecting a product through patents can be not only time consuming and difficult for a small company but also very costly. Suing someone for patent infringement can be even more expensive and time consuming than the patenting process itself.

Ron Ashkenas, from Harvard Business School, promotes simplicity as a key business strategy for improvement.⁷⁰ Complexity in business results in making objectives difficult to achieve.

Ashkenas identifies four sources of complexity:

Recognizing complexity is the first step. Admitting complex behavior to oneself leads to recognition of this weakness and triggers corrective action.

Vignette: Every Software Function Is Not Needed

“We need to cover all of them,” Mary insisted.

Mary and I were discussing the course material for our new customer’s technology training requirements. This was an important customer with offices in different cities across British Columbia. Delivering this course required a number of instructors with varying technical skills.

Initially, Mary, the company’s most experienced course developer, proposed an elaborate course manual covering a large number of software functions to ensure all the available software capabilities were included.

Nevertheless, after reviewing the various needs and uses of the software with the customer’s target course audience, we found that the people needing to understand the different functionalities of the software were using at most 10 percent of the functions the software offered. This allowed us to reduce the course complexity and to focus only on the specific needs of the target clientele.

We could now deliver the course in one day instead of the originally planned 3 days.

What was “lost” in revenue by reducing the course complexity was gained in price adjustment, increase in the number of courses delivered, and customer satisfaction. The simplified course could now reach a wider audience and allow a larger number of instructors to deliver it in a competent manner.

Less is more.

Useless Complexity

A telling example of useless complexity is reflected in the gradual and steady evolution of text processing and spreadsheet software complexity.

After more than 30 years in the technology marketplace as a practitioner, consultant, and executive, I still find it difficult to understand why some software companies continue to produce highly sophisticated text-processing or spreadsheet software when most of the users of this software use less than 10 percent of the functionality made available to them.

Victor Basili, a member of the Experimental Software Engineering Group at the University of Maryland, uses the following analogy when describing software complexity: When building walls, we use bricks. The bricks are neither simple nor complex. Complexity depends on the goal we use them for.

Some recent software available in the marketplace tackles precisely this phenomenon: keeping at bay those functionalities that can be distracting and useless to the regular end user.

Some examples of this type of software include Freedom,⁷¹ Isolator,⁷² LeechBlock,⁷³ Menu Eclipse,⁷⁴ and Think and Turn Off the Lights.⁷⁵ Their names are quite revealing.

Many other programs like Ulysses,⁷⁶ Scrivener,⁷⁷ WriteRoom,⁷⁸ Dark Room,⁷⁹ and Whitespace ⁸⁰ include full-screen, no-distraction modes, where the burden of menus, palettes, formulas, and so on is either hidden or disabled.

The accepted wisdom is that people can grasp 7 ± 2 variables. Humans can store about two to three abstract items at a time. The issue is not comprehension; it is rather that of focused retention of information. When the number of functions exceeds our capacity to remember them all at once, the less important functions move to the part of the brain called long-term or sometimes peripheral storage. The objective of software applications is to perform the required functions expected and not to be complex.

Why is this then not followed by application developers? One answer might reside in the concept of “cool software” as perceived by the developers. Where is the fun in making simple applications when one can add all those “cool” functions the competition forgot about?

The point is not that software engineers are not smart people—they just tend to overdo themselves. So do some executives.

What can be done about this?

First, as customers, we need to express our views when using those applications. We need to define what we do with them and how we do it. We need to demand that those applications maintain a simple user interface and allow the users to decide the level of complexity they require.

The same approach applies to product and service offerings.

In his book The Paradox of Choice,⁸¹ Barry Schwartz writes that having too many choices is not necessarily a good start for decision making. On the contrary, it makes decision making more difficult, potentially resulting in poor choices or regrets of not having made other choices.

Sometimes, offering more services or a greater variety of products might give the impression that they will generate more business. According to Mike Reining’s research, the contrary is often true.⁸² More choices increase the complexity of the offerings and put the customer in a more difficult decision-making situation. Fewer choices tailored to the company’s specialty make the customer’s decision easier and give the company a better opportunity to provide quality service.

Keep it simple (KIS).

Lessons Learned: Thinking Process Types

According to the Dual Process Theory, thinking processes can be categorized as Type I and Type II processes, the first as an intuitive thinking process and the second as an analytical thinking processes.ⁱ

Business scripts belong to the Type I process—the fast thinking process. Complexity impedes it.

Every business executive probably understands the concept of profit/earnings ratios. Executives do not need to think about what are profits or earnings because they recognize those immediately and know what they are. That is the Type I fast thinking process.

The concept of incentives, on the other hand, is more complex. Incentives can be different “things” to different people. One might have to evaluate some of those “things” and, upon given careful consideration to those “things,” consult some decision support source. So whether that source is online, or in a book or from an expert, one needs to follow this thinking process in a deliberate way that requires significant mental effort.

Shane Fredericks designed a short quiz to try to distinguish between a person’s analytical and intuitive thinking processes. To determine your thinking mode, take his cognitive reflection test.⁸³

Quickly jot down your answers to these three questions:

Answers to the above questions:

Question 1:

Question 2:

Question 3:

Shane found that the average number of analytical answers for Massachusetts Institute of Technology students was 2.18. Since they tend to be engineering students, this is not surprising. A Harvard choir group average was 1.43, and University of Toledo student average was 0.57.

By the way, in business, everything starts with Type II thinking process because a novice businessperson starts with no experience, no patterns, and no business scripts.

What is your thinking process type?

For more on the different strengths and weaknesses of analytical and intuitive thinking (combined as “holistic” thinking), read the article by Charles B. Parselle referenced in the endnotes.⁸⁴

ⁱIn psychology, a dual process theory provides an account of how thought can arise in two different ways, or as a result of two different processes. Often, the two processes consist of an implicit (automatic), unconscious process and an explicit (controlled), conscious psychology. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory.) L.F. Barrett, M.M., Tugade, and R.W. Engle. 2004. “Individual Differences in Working Memory Capacity and Dual-Process Theories of the Mind.” Psychological Bulletin 130, no. 4, pp. 553–73. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.130.4.553.