“If you can’t explain it to a six year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.” – Albert Einstein
There are two types of people in business:
- Simplifiers: who make complex things simple
- Complexifiers: who make simple things complex
Quick joke
Question: What does a complexifier call a simplifier?
Answer: “Boss.”
Somewhere, somehow, some people decided that in business you need to make everything complicated and speak using business jargon.
Well, that’s an interesting proposal and I’m not necessarily opposed to it, so let me run it up the flagpole so we can kick it around as a strawman. Since I hear the idea has some traction in the field, let me reach out to the guys upstairs, and we’ll see if we have the bandwidth to go forward with this. If the cost is North of $100K, I may have to backburner it, because we need to keep some dry powder pending the results of the strategy meeting — where I know we’re considering a pivot. Right now, the long pole in the tent isn’t marketing but strategy so let’s keep lines open. Kudos to the team for coming up with a such a great value proposition, but for now I’m afraid can’t lean in on this one.
That’s one way of hiding behind complexity: making yourself flat incomprehensible. While that may impress your peers, your subordinates will mock you and your superiors will ask to speak to someone else. As I argued in this post, when dealing with senior people you need to speak clearly and, above all, answer the question. In most organizations, while jargon and doublespeak may be prevalent in middle management, they are nearly absent in the boardroom.
The other way of hiding behind complexity is not linguistic but conceptual: always finding an upstream or bigger-picture issue that will block progress at the lower level. Consider this statement:
I’d like to cut over to the new process, but we haven’t completed the training yet.
Is this, as it appears, a valid reason for not making progress on moving to the new process or is it passive resistance disguised as a reason. For example, I don’t want to move to the new process so I keep “having trouble” scheduling the training. Or is bona fide complexification? If the training can be boiled down to one page that everyone can read in 5 minutes then just cut over.
Remember the old saw:
When you ask the time, some people will tell you how to build a watch. Others will tell you how to build a Swiss Village.
My test for spotting complexifiers is look for the following pattern:
- Slow progress on results
- Blamed on everything being difficult or complicated
- With a tendency to find artificial prerequisite activities that sound plausible, but on further examination aren’t.
Things are as complex as we want to make them. Most of the time complexity is an excuse for either not wanting to do something or not knowing how to do something.
My advice: strive to make things simple. Seek to understand them. Struggle to find apt metaphors for them. If you’re not burning real energy trying to simplify things for you audience, you are most like a complexifier. If so, the next time you’re about to explain to someone why something take so long, is so complicated, or requires 5 steps to be completed before the start, ask yourself — do I really believe this or I am making it complicated because I either don’t want or don’t know how to do it.
Dave, great post although a real paradigm shift and having a hard time wrapping my head around it. You really know how to color outside the lines and not sure if I should blue sky this now or put in the parking lot and peel back the onion later. This feels like low hanging fruit though so on a go forward basis I’ll check your blog for tips on squaring the circle for the elephant in the room.
Pingback: Best of Kellblog 2015 | Kellblog
Pingback: Are You a “Challenging” or Simply a “Difficult” Direct Report? | Kellblog
Love this – metaphors and analogies are great ways. I’m always amazed when people have that ‘aha moment’ after reading a parallel concept they understand.
Perhaps another reason why simplifies go further is that in order to simplify, you need to extract the essentials or the most important pieces out of an idea, strategy, or situation, etc.
Also, interesting to me was that immediately stuck out as the difference between good leaders and stuffy technicians, too. Good leaders I’ve worked with have clear at insightful goals. Where as stuffy technicians tend to bog everything down in needless complexity and stifle projects.