complexity and complication

Michael, a fellow Enterprise Irregular, reminded me of one of my pet peeves in his posts here and here. Thanks Michael ;)

We all too often equal complexity with complication:

Complex is when something consists of many different and connected parts.

Complicate is to make things more difficult or confusing by making it more complex.

And boy do we complicate things. And boy do I hate it. And boy do we often use it as an excuse for not rocking the boat!

I think the sentence "but it is much more complex than you think!" may be my most disfavoured sentence, a message I hear much too often. Actually I think only once would have been once too much.
It is the first step to complicate things. Worst, it's almost always used as an argument to stop all further discussion. Intellectual laziness I call such.

I once studied chemistry, mathematics and physics because I liked it. No I loved it.

I'm sure there are readers out there that have felt the same when the "aha!" hit them after struggling with a particular concept for hours or days.

Have you ever wondered why?

Not that I want to challenge Greek philosophers or any other fine thinking around this theme - but for me it was the following:

Everything is complex. Every day we meet hard-to-understand issues, complex as they are, above all for natural phenomena.

With 6.022 X 10ˆ23 molecules in 18 grams of water, add a few gazillion more and different molecules into the pot and how could it not be complex?

But then a student got his head around the atoms, then how they react with each other and build molecules and suddenly the complexity was possible to handle. A finite number of atoms, some rather not complex set of rules and much of the stage was set for an understanding of what happened in my beaker.

That is when I got the "aha!" and complexity was no more a threat. Actually I started to love complexity.

Note that I did not reduce the complexity, nor did I simplify - I could now "see" and accept all the parts and their relationships, the whole complex molecular world - a much more gratifying and useful situation than the simplify-all approach of the alchemists!

As with the chemistry I once studied, the only way to handle complexity and diffuse complication is to be radical and go to the roots, find the basic building blocks and their relationships then rebuild an understandable complexity that can be used in every day life.

The sentence should be "it is very complex, so let's roll up the sleeves and see what parts it consists of and how they relate to each other!".

Complexity is nothing to be afraid of, on the contrary it should spur us to go and explore and understand. Beware of the complicators, they're just lazy!

Enterprise Software, running enterprises, a most complex area that increasingly is complicated by many - a most ripe area for radical exploration me thinks. What fun it'll be!

Comments

[Michael Krigsman]

Thanks, Sig! Isn't it amazing how designing something simple is so hard.

Personally, I prefer simple things designed really well.

Cheers,
Michael

[sig]

Michael, just this morning Thomas pointed me to this post http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/simplicity-the from which I cheekily copy this:

"...making something “simpler” is often a case of relocating complexity, rather than eliminating it from the user-technology relationship. For example, from the driver’s perspective, a manual-shift transmission is more complex than an automatic transmission. But from an overall systems perspective, the automatic transmission is equally or even more complex."

Well put I say, and it says something else in my view - you have to understand the complexity, and accept it, so as to "relocate" the complexity and thus make things "simpler".

The big issue methinks is that we have this tendency to rebuff complexity off hand then making a few assumptions to cut things down to something "simple" - and that approach would not work with the gear system in a car, as it should not work for an enterprise system.

The big difference there would be that a bad design of gears would give instant feedback, the car would not budge, while in the enterprise world iffy and badly designed stuff survives - the ensuing problems are simply relocated (duh) to management consultants, coaches and such :)

[Paul P Magee]

Hi Sig, reminds me of a Rugby practice session with my 12 year old son, on the beach last week. Throwing the ball to each other I suggested we throw and catch only with our left hands for a while. (Both being right handed)

I can't do it! He proclaimed. A fatherly silence (and probably a raised eye brow) was all it took for him to realise his weak arguement and try and justify it, making excuses about distance, how his left arm was weaker, how I was bigger etc etc.

Before long not only had he convinced himself that he couldn't do it, but he had upped the stakes to a world encompassing - It's impossible, it can not be done!

Instead of saying 'It can't be done' I said, why not try asking a question 'if it were possible, how might we do it? and how might it improve our game?'.

So we moved closer together, throwing and catching the ball with our left hands from just 1 meter away. And then slowly we moved further apart, and then further, until eventually we were throwing and catching the ball, left hands only from a good deal further than we had been doing it with our right hands.

It was a whole 24 hours after this life changing lesson before I heard him say something else was totally impossible! Doing the dishes I think, because he had a sore arm. :)

[sig]

Paul, there you go! :D

Seems the early age "I have never tried it before, thus it's impossible" gets refined over the years to "I cannot understand how, thus it's impossible", most often adding "and that my friend you should understand too" so as to avoid any further discussion!

As I always say, all business leaders should spend months teaching/leading kids, identical reactions and issues as with grownups!

[John]

I come to this late Sig but I'm always reminded by a friend who did his Phd in complexity twenty years ago and still teaches the stuff that complexity isn't actually complex - very simple interactions can create complexity - you don't actually need lots of different parts, you just need a lot of iterations - it's the number of connections that are the key.

That said - everything he tries to explain to me seems exceedingly complicated!