The Death of Complexity and The Rise of Small Things

I have an obsession with simple things.

Normally, we take pride in getting the complex stuff right. It is more glamorous, more prestigious; getting simple things right seems so mundane in comparison. The formulation of the grand overarching five year strategy traditionally occupy the finest minds in the company (or at least those with the highest pay level). The actual day-to-day implementation – making sure that the product will in fact work – well, that is more appropriate for lesser minds to deal with. There is little doubt that in the minds of most organisations, doing strategy is somehow ‘finer’ than doing implementation.

There is something fundamentally wrong with our obsession with complexity. I started thinking about this when I was a platoon commander in the army, participating in large-scale field exercises. There, I noticed that in 90 to 95 percent of the cases, when something went wrong, it wasn’t because of the complex stuff. The complex stuff received a lot of attention and careful advance planning, and had a decent success rate, all things considered. It was the simple stuff that went wrong. Somebody would confuse left and right, and botch up a major part of the exercise. Someone else would accidentally push the wrong button on the radio, so that the support divisions didn’t hear the attack order, with predictable results. Or a third somebody would mix up two numbers and end up calling an airstrike on his own headquarters (not a great career move).

To sum it up: most of the time, it is the simple things that go wrong. And this is really stupid, because the simple things are a lot easier to fix than the complicated things. Nobody can fully mastermind a global, multi-stage product launch, but we can make sure that the guy in the marketing division talks regularly with the guy in the sales division. We can’t predict all of the organisational changes that will take place because of our flashy new sales database system, but we can make sure that the user interface can be understood by the people who are to enter the data in the first place.

So, here’s my suggestion: for the next week or two, forget everything about the strategy of your company. Postpone your meetings with all those visionaries that want to tell you about the future. Instead, start focusing on the simple things, on the here and now. And don’t stop until you are sure that they work, and work well. Only then will it make sense to return to the higher spheres of planning, secure in the knowledge that your grand visions won’t founder on the shores of simplicity.

Ultimate vs. proximate causes

A mental framework that I have found useful is the distinction between proximate and distal causes – or, if you prefer, immediate versus ultimate explanations for things.

The best way to illustrate the difference is to consider the following question: Why do we have sex? A proximate (or near) explanation is simply to say ‘because we enjoy it’. Sex feels good, so we generally try to have it often.

This is true, but it is not complete. To fully answer the question, it is necessary to then ask ‘but why are human beings built so that we find sex enjoyable?’ The answer to this comes from evolution: the tendency to like and want sex is hardwired into our nature, because sex has been good (critical, actually) for the reproductive success of our ancestors. Those of our distant ancestors who didn’t have sex simply didn’t have offspring, and so never passed on their sex-hating genes. As it is, we are all descendants of people who went to great lengths to get sex, and thus managed to populate the world with their children; this is the reason why we like it.

This explanation is a so-called ultimate (or distal) explanation. It is what pops up when you keep asking ‘why’ to the first answer. Another, slightly different example of the same thing is taken from The Economist (I can’t remember which issue): Why does the water in a kettle boil? One cause could be “the water boils because heat is transferred from the hot stove to the kettle”. A completely different explanation is to say “because I wanted a cup of tea”.

The point is that there can be a hierarchy of causes for things, and that those causes are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It all depends on what you are trying to do when you are posing the question.

The Hedonic Threadmill

In the scientific study of happiness, a particularly interesting finding is that people quickly adjust to new-gained wealth - even major increases in income or life quality have only a passing effect on your basic happiness level. Lottery winners are in heaven for a month or two, and then it's back to feeling averagely happy (or unhappy) again.

This universal phenomenon is called the hedonic threadmill. The hunt for happiness is a futile endeavour, at least if the goal is to become happy. We think that happiness will be ours when we have a private jet plane, but once we get it, the goalposts move once again, and we realise that true happiness comes only when we have two personal jet planes. And so on.

Interestingly, according to Daniel Nettle's book Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, there is a sound evolutionary explanation for this. Our drive for happiness is nature's way of keeping us striving to improve our lives. If it was easy to become happy, or if the effect was permanent, we would still be sitting in our caves, supremely happy because, hey, we have a cave to sit in. No reason to strive for higher things when you have a nice cave to sit in. No bears in it, too. Being unhappy, however, is a call for action: it makes us try to improve things. The human propensity to continually search for more happiness is nature's way of keeping us on our toes, ever looking for ways to do better.

On a side note, Denmark - a puny yet curiously wonderful nation of which I am a proud member - has recently been found to be the happiest country in the world. It must be all those girls biking around in summer dresses.

See my review of Nettle's book on happiness.