I — Expertise is complex; it must become homely and clear

To obtain your specialised knowledge, you need time and depth. Like an iceberg — a quiet crystal peak above the waters — that holds centuries of frozen storms underneath. If your work is to share it, you will need an additional competence; to make your hidden treasury simple for laypersons who meet it first time. The complication became crystal-clear to you, after your long journey of assimilating the knowledge, the experience and the expertise your domain requires. It is however a very different kind of work to translate it into forms uninitiated minds will grasp. Your complex knowledge is once more raw material to make meaningful to other people.

You make things simple when you bring people to understand them. To understand means to place a thing in accord with one's own mind, within direct reach, obvious. Nobody understands on anyone else's behalf. They are the only ones who can understand, for themselves. People understand the thing that resounds in images familiar to their mind and in commonsense words they are at ease to use. They understand when they exclaim, Aha! So, this is what it is! You must cause this Aha!

The skill that triggers another person's understanding is a fine art, and it gives power. There is value in making things simple⁶⁴, because complexity threatens and stupefies, and we all tend to evade it. Simplicity, by contrast, feels homely and practical. It aids one understand, learn and manage.

What this handbook is about

There are two large families of simplicity that the word simple blends, and only one of them is my subject.

The first family is the simplicity of things — simple objects, simple artworks, simple lifestyles, simple theories elegantly composed. This is the simplicity of the Bauhaus chair, of the haiku, of Occam's razor wielded inside a scientific discipline. It is a fine subject, but it is not mine.

My subject is the second family: the simplicity that is crafted by a specialist for somebody else. It is the simplicity of a representation, of a concept, of an explanation. It may be show-how, a piece of advice that has been fitted to a particular person or group, so that they might make use of it. It is communication enabling agency. On the other hand, when someone else makes things simple for us, we depend on them. Our attention, our reference information, even our worldview and often our actions are quietly influenced by what they show and interpret for us.

This is why quality simplification has nothing to do with vulgarisation.

The line we walk

This primer is concerned with staying on the right side of a line. At one extreme, the matter is so unsimplified that no ordinary person can figure it, and judgement is therefore surrendered to whoever owns the expertise. At the other extreme, the matter is so over-simplified that what arrives in the listener's mind is no longer the matter at all — it is a flattering substitute. On the middle way, I claim that making-simple done well is what allows people to know what they do and to do what they know. Clarifying, is thus an art of showing choices.

What follows is a practitioner's account of this art. I wrote it for anyone whose work or life requires them to make complicated things understandable and useful to other people. This goes far beyond consulting.