Human Wisdom

The Power to Make Things Simple — Edition 2026

The Power to Make Things Simple

THE POWER TO MAKE THINGS SIMPLE

Edition 2026

Ioan Tenner

There is no stronger persuasion than causing people to understand

PREFACE

This text is the long-delayed rewrite of an essay I first wrote in 2011, revised in 2012, 2015, and again in 2016 and early 2026. The essay has kept finding readers, which is gratifying, but the world changed fast and the subject grew more relevant in the world we now live in—a world ever more complex, of information overload, high specialisation, post-truth politics, algorithmic feeds, and machine-generated explanation that did not exist when I first sat down to write. This edition brings up to date the concept and practice of professional simplification.

The subject itself is older in my work. The Power to Make Things Simple began as the first of six “powers” I identified in The Consulting Difference, a primer I wrote in 1986 for Digital Equipment Corporation’s expert consultants across Europe, Japan and the United States, for whom I had designed and taught a consulting competency curriculum. The six abilities were the power to make things simple, the pragmatic attitude, the tactic of giving a choice, the N±1 strategy, the rhetoric of action, and the art of change—the people side of any consultancy. The present compendium expands the first of them, the competence to simplify properly, because it turned out to be the foundation on which the other five rest. If you cannot bring a complicated thing into a shape another person can hold, you cannot help that mind to judge, to choose, or to act.

This primer is written for the true, well-informed, seasoned expert authority or erudite — teacher, consultant, lawyer, politician, spiritual leader, doctor, journalist, designer, engineer,— with a vocation to break enabling knowledge, direct people and transfer competence to newcomers to their domain.

— Ioan Tenner, Geneva, 2026

Read the book

  1. I — Expertise is complex; it must become homely and clear
  2. II — Why simplification works
  3. Selected examples of making-simple
  4. III — A heritage of thought about understanding
  5. IV — The practice of making simple
  6. V — The dark side of “simple”
  7. VI — The wisdom to simplify—or not
  8. A Note, Credits and End Note
  9. Bibliography
  10. Contents — Finding your way through this book

To obtain an eBook copy of this book, please write to Ioan Tenner at ioan@tenner.org.