We’re born into chaos, spend our lives seeking order, and die realizing we never had control. 

This is the human condition. And it’s not hard to see why. If our ancestors spent too much time worrying about the complex stuff (e.g. quadratic equations), they wouldn’t have had the remaining bandwidth to worry about more simple matters (e.g. dealing with that saber-tooth tiger about to eat them). The more easily we can synthesize a model of the universe that our limited mental capacity can process, the more likely we are to survive to pass on our genes. We’ve been hardwired to simplify. 

This is why in 1992 during Bill Clinton’s Presidential run, instead of getting every member of the campaign team to read a 300-page summary of Clinton’s strategy, the campaign manager, James Carville, famously wrote “It’s the Economy, Stupid,” on a whiteboard in the office, using four words to sum up the issues affecting a nation. 

It’s not about dumbing things down but creating clarity amid chaos. Compression without loss. It’s also really, really hard. Which of course, makes it really, really valuable. 

The trouble is, the more we simplify, the more we think we understand. The more we think we understand, the more we believe we can control. As this wonderful interview by the economist and former Governor of The Bank of England, Lord Mervyn King, highlights, simplicity makes us prone to overestimate how much control we have over events, especially random ones. Just because we figured out “a working model,” or even “optimized” everything, it’s still a model. The world is still more complicated than any model we are capable of creating. 

Simplicity and simplistic are not the same thing. As Einstein advised, “make things as simple as possible; but no simpler.” 

Our job as leaders is to embrace the paradox. We’ll never solve complexity or get rid of it, we have to navigate it. Dance with it. For both ourselves and our people. Simplicity isn’t the absence of complexity. As the great sculptor Constantin Brancusi said, “Simplicity is complexity resolved.”