II — Why simplification works

The psychology of complexity

Much detail is foreseeable confusion. Too much analysis is paralysis. Academic abstraction, precise and accurate, is an alien planet which most of us must take on unverified trust. Plenty of choice is perplexity. Too many probabilities defeat the mind. Multiple opinions spell conflict. Profuse words raise the suspicion of ignorance and of a will to mystify. Expert jargon, however technically necessary, is felt by those outside the discipline as a device for keeping them dependent on that very expertise. Erudite abundance and subtlety can feel like an insult to those who do not grasp them. This is the humble psychology of complexity brought to people.

Herbert Simon, who spent his life on the question of how humans decide, explained that we have no choice but to simplify reality in order to act in it.¹⁵ We do this for ourselves, with our own minds, or the organisation around us does it for us.

The cognitive sciences have measured what every advisor or shopkeeper has always known. Too many options demotivate decision rather than aiding it; Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper's classic experiments showed shoppers walking away from a tasting table with twenty-four jams while buying briskly from a table of six.¹ A meta-analysis spanning decades of choice-overload research confirms the pattern.¹ The mind that is asked to hold too much, too unstructured, lets go.

Complication, like most unfamiliar things, produces uncertainty, insecurity, and a sense of incompetence. People are lost in it. They hate to decide — particularly among many choices — and they are anxious to be exposed when they do not get what they are supposed to seize. They will not say so. They will nod, smile, and quietly delegate.

Clarification is an entry point

Simplicity, by contrast, makes one feel in control. Plain things are seen as elegant, obvious, reality itself. This is why simple presentation is effective as a means of educational facilitation.

It is a tool, that helps new learning to begin. A temporary tool like Zhuangzi’s fish and rabbit snare which you put aside after the catch. ² After the good start simplification hands over to detailed, specific learning as needed.

At a critical moment of knowledge transfer, plainness offers a sense of natural comprehension. This is not only an aesthetic preference. There is a measurable cognitive mechanism behind it. What is easy for one to conceive is also judged true, more readily trusted, and more easily acted upon.¹⁹

Deeper, the sense of understanding is a certifying bridge between the small but reassuring personal experience we all have of the close — the things we can verify with our own senses — and all the rest of our reference about the distal world. That rest is an immensity of other people's knowledge, the sources of which are distant and unreachable to us, so that we know it exclusively by belief in the witnessing communication of others.

The bridge of felt understanding is a powerful thing, and a dangerous one.¹⁹ For now, hold it as a paradox: the very feature of the mind that makes honest making-simple possible is also what makes dishonest simplification effective.

The one able to translate alien complexity into familiar simplicity has power. And influence. And responsibility.

Understanding is persuasive

In exchange for clarity and simpler choices that make them feel secure, people are willing to delegate part of their judgement and freedom. We trust instinctively those who make us understand. We seek those who reduce our doubts as we put our hope in those who make us believe. We follow those who show the ends of tunnels. We entrust the clarifying minds to think for us — to define what things are, to explain how they are, what they are worth for us, how the world is, what choices we have, and thus what we should do. The understanding so formed in our mind will shape, with its frames and references, what we think and what we do. Even when we do not like it. In a way, it is a form of surrogate experiencing. You have significant impact on your audience.

Comprehensible communication is defined by what obtains in the eyes of the beholder, not by some property of the matter itself.

At the receiving end, simple is for us what seems clear and makes sense to us — what takes the size and shape of our mind, what we can put our arms around, what is not out of our reach and beyond our attention span. Something which appears within our means, our eyes, our ears, our hands, our imagining, our common places; something intelligible, doable, practical.

Making things simple — without falsifying them — can generate moments of wisdom as an outcome. The persons receiving can own them and they are put at the centre of their own world, empowered to make sense of things from their own standpoint and in their perceived best interest. Fitting communication to situation and occasion is very different from explaining things presented as complicated as they are, or even more complicated than they are and showing them as beyond a layperson's possible understanding.

Clarity is not reduced to showing fewer elements, better organised; it’s about legibility.

A thing may have many parts and be simple, or few parts and be out of reach — too deep, too alien, too complicated, too difficult.

The sand on the beach with its myriads of grains, the starry sky, are simple. Driving your car is simple once you have done it for a while and do not need to lift the bonnet. Familiar things grow simple; the old grows simple; but everything new is so complicated. The bicycle or the horse you ride for the first time, the new tin-opener, writing an important letter, your first baby — all are complicated and intimidating. To boil an egg, or to set up a computer, is complicated if you do not know how. Remember how hard it was to learn the letters of the alphabet. In a foreign country everything is confusing, because you miss the language and the mores. Clarity comes from coherence, better organised structure, transparency of meaning and purpose.

The most complex thing we encounter is, I find, accelerating change and its surprising nature when it is, as I like to say, something else entirely — the not-yet-known, the unknown, with too many possibilities, blank pages to write and conceivable scenarios to imagine. Taking change with fatalism, whatever may come, is simple. Anticipating what will happen or being the ones who shape the future is intricate work for the mind.

Two curves of mastery

There are two overlapping learning curves when specialists who had learned complicated things need to teach them to newcomers.

A curse of much knowledge

Mastery of specialist knowledge starts low and grows gradually with study and experience. Arrived at expertise level, expertise complicates beyond reach of lay people. Only later after long gestation, it will become limpid and transparent, fit to pass to other people.

The ability to simplify and to be understandable follows a different learning curve:

First, we know so little that things look simple to us. Amateurism sees things simple, grasping only what meets the eye. This is the beginner’s simplicity. Then, as we learn, things grow extremely complicated, and our mind falls to the cult of precision and completeness. Now, being an expert means explaining everything, precisely. That is a time, call it Curse of knowledge or Erudite despair, a paradoxical dip of the ability to simplify. To explain anything, you must tell everything. The map grows as large as the territory, as Borges so cruelly drew it. ³ Erudition and expertise discover, and know successively, the bitter-sweet despair of never-ending complication. Now simplicity is impossible.

Finally, the expert’s knowledge is assimilated and becomes limpid; there is that sudden moment of bliss when everything falls into place and things are simple again, in a new way. Now we see form and order in disorder, coherence in complication, symmetry in opposition, finally in chaos. Now, the skill to explain evolves into wise simplicity. You see the few things that count. You may even glimpse where things come from and where they go. Understanding crystallises the essential, the meaning, in a clear form and in your own words and gesture, coming naturally. Now you have the power. You are ready for making things simple. To learn the art, you must travel this paradoxical double path of knowledge and communication.

This new gift emerges only after you have forgotten everything you learned at school — as Einstein liked to say, quoting an anonymous witty man whose name has not survived. ⁴ By then, you have replaced remembering with understanding. Instead of sleeping in you, your knowledge has become you. Now you find Boileau, the poet, to be right: Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement, et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément — what is well conceived is clearly said, and the words to say it come with ease. ⁵

Making-simple is a translator's work

From one frame into another

Artful simplification accomplishes a transformation. It consists in extracting meaning from one context — lifting ideas, narratives and things from one frame and fitting them into another: that of the people you want to inform and help. Imagine the word frame like the actual frame of a painting; you render a picture, meaningful and acceptable in a novel local frame, to a new public.

As you carry the matter into a new context, you translate and interpret: from one language to another, from one point of view, context, set of references, level of abstraction or occasion to another, from one image to another, one paradigm — sometimes one world-view — to another; from one culture, understanding and sensibility to another; and sometimes even from one truth to another.

Deeper still, your work is to find or shape the meme — the idea, the structure of meaning capable of spreading into other minds — so that you become able to formulate it again in many languages and at various levels of complication or simplicity. ⁶

The requirement of this work, like any form of translation, is to know the two languages, and to know what you do. Imagine someone who knows only the source language, not the target; imagine a book translated by someone who does not comprehend it; imagine a book simplified in translation — that is the difference between making things understandable and reducing them for people one considers too silly to comprehend. Traduttore traditore.

As I insisted, to make things simple, you do not scorn your public; you respect them, you have sympathy and patience. It does not help to shout louder from one’s ivory tower at people one does not know, understand, or care for. They hear very well — possibly better than the speaker hears himself. It is just that he does not make sense to them.

Those who give signs — irritated, superior, all-knowing, impatient — that they cannot stand ignorance and incompetence cannot be advisors and teachers, or they will be poor ones. The reason people need things to be re-presented to them, the very reason they need (and often pay for) one's help, is the discomfort the impatient simplifier cannot bear. ⁷