Complexity and the Theory of the Regular Guy
I’m always hearing the word “complex” these days. People are always telling me situations are complex, or technology is complex, or business is complex. I get to feeling pretty overwhelmed, if not downright inadequate. How can I ever figure things out and keep up with what’s going on?
We live in a culture fascinated with complexity, we often think complexity is a sign of genius and we often think something isn’t worth much if it isn’t complex. I want to go on record in my capacity as an occasional contrarian and say that complexity is NOT a sign of value or of advanced technology or of genius. Complexity is actually the sign of an incompletely solved problem or an incompletely understood situation.
I think about times when people use the word complex to describe something; I think about the times when even I resort to the use of that word and my motives for doing so. It seems we mostly use the word when we want to create a smokescreen to cover our own lack of understanding. This is much like what ancient geographers used to do when trying to draw maps of parts of the earth they didn’t know anything about. In those areas on their maps they would draw in mythical creatures or state, “There be dragons here.”
Things could not possibly be as complex as some people want us to believe. I know this because of what I call the “Theory of the Regular Guy”. This theory observes that most of us folks who make the world work are just regular guys and in spite of that most things work pretty well most of the time. So, through deductive reasoning, the theory goes on to state that, ipso facto (that’s Latin for “therefore”), things really are not so complex, because if they were, all us regular folks couldn’t keep up and everything would be falling apart.
Things can always be made to work better, but that does not mean they need to become more complex. Complexity is the result of cleverness but not genius. All you need in order to create complexity is an advanced degree (I’m afflicted with such a degree myself). We humans love to show our cleverness with mind boggling displays of complexity. But this is not to be confused with true genius.
True genius occurs when
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