Jed Hallam

I’ve been wrestling with this blog post for two weeks now. What began as an argument for complexity in business became a 4,000 word animal on complexity in life, sexuality, politics and ecology. Needless to say I’ve had to drastically edit it for it to be even barely readable. I stress barely.

I may post the sections on life, sexuality and ecology at some point in the future, but for now, here are my thoughts on the importance of complexity and the dangers of simplicity in business. (Also, this is very much a word in progress.)

I’ve always thought that the simplest route to understanding was to break everything into smaller pieces, understand each piece and then slowly put it all back together. Breaking complex systems into manageable, simple blocks. After I failed my maths A-Level (long story) I started to become quite interested in numbers, and in my first job I spent a lot of time looking at how to break down complex systems to create algorithms which produced simple, understandable numbers.

Simplicity out of complexity. That’s what people want, that’s what sells. It’s easy to buy something that’s very neatly packaged and seems simple to operate. In fact, (and I have no research to back this up) it seems the brain functions by filing things into boxes.

Taxonomies for our beliefs, our morals, our looks, our friends, our sexuality, our jobs and our possessions.

Everything in its right place.

The problem with this is that life isn’t simple. And things don’t tend to fit into categories.

“Categorising always produces reduction in true complexity” Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan.

Anyone that knows me will understand that my whole outlook on life has been shaped a fair bit by the philosophical and economic theory of ‘the black swan’. One of the biggest components of this theory is that we post-rationalise and force things into categories in order for us to be able to understand them within current constructs. Except life is slightly more chaotic and random than our constructs will allow.

There are simply too many variables.

John Maeda is (I think) the father of the simplicity versus complexity debate. His book, The Laws Of Simplicity, is a manifesto for the importance of simplicity. He explains how simplicity is the process of removing the meaningful from a situation and focussing on that. Creating singularity out of complexity and putting the focus on the core, rather than the periphery. Which is fine, except when we look for the singular meaning, we do so with our internal taxonomies in play. We look for meaning in the known knowns and we cast aside everything else. It is this type of template/category approach that (I think) hurts business strategy.

There are very few brands that employ true innovation. We constantly view new ideas through our old experiences. We use empiricism to judge the future, and as Taleb would tell you, just because it has always been, does not make it always so.

The thinking behind the black swan concept comes from David Hume, who said “No amount of observations of a white swan can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan can refute that conclusion”. If we always plan and innovate based on what we’ve always done, we’ll never do anything new. But we look for simple solutions that we can replicate. But there are no templates, because the world is constantly moving.

What works for one brand won’t for the next, and what has worked in one market might not work in the next. There are too many variables. Employee experience, customer base, media, economy, culture – there are simply too many actors on the stage for a one size fits all approach to work. But a one size fits all approach is easy to buy (and sell) because it creates simplicity out of complexity, comfort out of uncertainty.

You can also see this in the way in which many agencies sell themselves too. They’ve forgotten why they set up business in the first place (to help brands either make more money or save more money). A huge multi-national recently said that it was planning on taking ideas from any agency, regardless of what category that agency fell into. It was a revelation. It made the front pages of the trade press  – it made the front pages that any agency can have a good idea. The front page. This is very brave, many brands still define their budgets and work by their agencies, rather than the ideas. And agencies reinforce this in order to stay safe. They carefully edge their way into categories that get them onto rosters in order to hoover up work, and then they become comfortable. “Well we’ve done some great digital campaigns, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”

I come back to Taleb. Just because it always has been, does not make it always so. The world is complex and things change. Ideas are here and now, experience was yesterday.

This is a problem with wider business, too. The majority of businesses are eager to scale, so they build departments. Those departments then contain staff whom each do a specific job (very Adam Smith) and each of those employees is then responsible for their role. Except it’s more complicated than that and as the business starts to grow, more and more cracks appear (read this excellent post from John Willshire). Everyone absolves themselves of responsibility for the bigger picture, “I do my job to deliver my outputs”. There is a culture of micro-business.

But what has caused such a conservative approach to business? In my opinion, it’s a combination of short term thinking and fear of failure. The average tenure of a CMO is currently 18-24 months. Usually less than two years. Two years. There is obviously a mass of pressure to make an impact in a short amount of time, and so the temptation is to ‘short’ your brand – hit short term goals at the expense of long term goals. Then move on with your success to a new job. This is akin to the cartoon strip where the character cross the lake by stepping quickly over crocodiles noses – move fast enough and you won’t get caught out, stand around waiting and someone will get eaten.

One of the things that John Maeda nailed was simplicity in branding and communication (he gives a great TED talk on this too). If human nature prefers to receive information in carefully wrapped packages, then sell them products in the same way. The iPhone. Google. Music. Home insurance. Gym memberships. Everything is made as simple as possible in order to make people feel like they’re empowered and free (regardless of the complexity that lies behind the facade). But this has led to people ‘collecting’ things. Because brands can produce things en masse that appear simple, people want more things. Social media has also accelerated this. “I can have information neatly packaged and handed to me by Wikipedia immediately, so I want more.” Except that information is much more shallow and so we know less about much more.

This short term, aesthetic approach is fine, until we hit a much bigger issue, at which point we try and rationalise complexity in a dangerous way (see the London riots).

One of my favourite examples of ignorance of these types of constructs and categories is children. Children approach life with such a lack of experience that everything is to be wondered at. In his essay Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire said “The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a child absorbs form and colour”. Those annoying moments when a child continuously asks the question “why?” are always massively revealing, because so frequently we don’t have an answer and we answer “because it just is”. At what point do we stop (rightly) questioning the world and give in? When do we simply slip beneath the water and look for simple answers?

I think that (for many people) that moment is the moment that their creativity dies.

Ideas and inspiration come from conflict. It is in clashing ideas that new ideas are born -  when our brains drop all of the boxes of categories on the floor of our mind, we finally see something new. That’s why the best ideas that we have are out of context – on the bus, in the park, in a restaurant – talking or thinking about something completely out of context (listen to Jon Steel for further proof). Foucault said that inspiration came from the self-destruction and convulsion of our minds – so why do we try and force creativity into a process? If Steven Johnson’s idea of the adjacent possible is right, why aren’t we spending more time destroying the categories we’ve built in society (and our minds)?

Process is, in my eyes, the antithesis of action. It’s like organised fun. Nothing new comes from process, because process is built around empirical constructs. “It has worked before, so it will work again.” And it’s probably true, if it’s worked before, it probably will work again. But it won’t achieve the same result, because the world will have moved on since then. Just because it always was doesn’t make it always so.

This also probably goes some way to explain our fear of death. Most  people are afraid of death, they cannot comprehend it (unless they have specific religious leanings, in which case they’ve already simplified death and given it a name) because they haven’t experienced it before and cannot liken it to anything else (or any other category). Why do we fear death? Because it is inevitable. But why do we not question what existed before we were born? Because surely it is the same? We knew nothing of life before we were born, and we will know nothing of it after we die. Empiricism and simplicity falter at death.

I genuinely believe that we should embrace the chaos. We should rely on our ability to navigate complexity. You just have to look at the work of Hans Monderman and his traffic experiments to see the value and benefit of relying on chaos. Chaos and complexity saves lives because they force people to think more. If you cannot buy simplicity, you have to begin to unpick complexity. You have to think (there’s an excellent article on the death of thinking in the NYT).

Once we begin to understand the systems and life more intricately, we can begin to accept our limitations. Umberto Eco had a library full of books he’d never read – why? Because they then became known unknowns, rather than unknown unknowns. And knowing what you don’t know is the biggest part of the battle.