Two modes of simplicity

Summary: You can pursue simplicity by saying goodbye to complexity or by embracing ownership of it. Both are critically important strategies.

Background

This insight came from a recent team meeting. A team member and I had been tasked with drafting an exploration of a brave new world — not so much to pitch a proposal as to produce anything concrete that the rest of the team could respond to start the conversation.

It was very complex. Especially to people who hadn’t spent the hours thinking and talking about it that we had. Our teammates said as much and I agree with their assessment. It was reinforced that our team values simplicity very highly, but the new lesson was that there are (at least) two very different ways to pursue it.

Let’s start by asking simple for whom?

Mode 1: Say Goodbye

If you want to make your own life simpler, you need to say goodbye to the elements that make it complex. This can be as challenging as it is simple. Marie Kondo’s KonMari™ method for de-cluttering one’s closet is a good illustration — put all your clothes on the bed, evaluate each piece for how much it “sparks joy” in your life, and say thank you and goodbye to any that don’t make the cut. For me, the value of this approach is recognizing that there’s a real, ongoing cost to keeping things around. The value they bring to your life should justify that cost, or else why keep them?

In stickier territory, this pattern can also be fruitfully applied to relationships, jobs, habits, hobbies, addictions, etc. If what you want is a simpler life, look at these, and take them out of the equation if the joy doesn’t justify the cost.

Serving Others

But what if you want to make life simple for someone else? Maybe a family member, friend, client, customer?

Mode 1 is still an appropriate strategy in many cases. You can set boundaries on what your service can realistically entail, e.g. “Our volunteers provide live interpretation service for non-native English speakers, but they must be at least 18 years old, to protect the privacy and safety of minors.” This can benefit both you and the person you’re trying to help, by establishing expectations and preventing you from committing to a level of service that you can’t deliver on.

But there’s a different class of opportunity where providing a simple solution to a thorny problem is your value proposition, and side-stepping that problem is a non-starter.

Mode 2: Own the Complexity

In this mode, your goal is to hide complexity rather than avoid it.

Here’s an example from my current work: our missionary language learners have access to periodic assessments through a vendor. We think the assessments are great, but in order to launch into them, they have to create a separate login with this vendor directly. This ensures that we’re observing appropriate consent and data safety practices, but at the expense of additional complexity for our learners.

To improve the situation, we’re exploring ways to use an existing login with an entity they’ve already chosen to trust (our organization), then generating a secure unique identifier that is used only for interacting with this vendor. This way, the vendor can reliably (pseudonymous-ly) service this user without knowing anything about who they are (other than that we vouch for them).

To be clear, this solution is not simple. It involves a new database, assuming responsibility for the integrity of that data, and consuming it in ways that are meaningful to the user in other components of our existing system.

But the experience will be much simpler for our learners. They’ll simply indicate that they’re ready to take a test, and start. No second login, no account recovery flow, just pure assessment bliss. (It’s helpful to note that gratefully, our vendor has also practiced Mode 2 by making an API that generates a magic sign-in link, owning the complexity of their own authentication needs in order to give us a simpler solution).

As my boss said when I shared the kernel of this idea, it’s like a watch. The experience of telling time by glancing at the face should be simple, but behind that face is a complex system of components powering the experience.

Find Synergy: Watch the Cost

Both modes are valid and important, but they carry different costs. Avoiding complexity is largely about opportunity cost; by limiting the scope of what you’re willing to do, you’ll lose some of your potential audience/market/impact. That “potential” is really important, though, because your finite resources already means you have to weigh your opportunities and focus on the most promising ones.

The cost of owning complexity is more about burning additional resources to make a complex experience simpler. It’s wickedly easy to underestimate the cost of providing a simple solution to a thorny problem. I suspect this is because we use the simplicity of the experience as our baseline for estimation, rather than the complexity of the underlying system. It’s not hard to use an iPhone or a credit card or Venmo or Instagram, but it’s actually extraordinarily expensive to create the services that make them possible.

With that in mind, these two modes of simplification can ultimately be synthesized into a beautiful balance— be really picky about which thorny problems you will provide elegant solutions to, and then own the complexity end-to-end for those few things you want to be really good at. Say goodbye to the rest.

How have you seen these two modes play out in your efforts to simplify?