Why We Need Simplicity not Complexity During a Pandemic
Right now, in the middle of a pandemic, things could not get more complex. Our normal lives are suspended, in lockdown. Human social contact is reduced to anything technology can provide by proxy, because the real thing is out of the question. Medics and politicians alike are grapple with having to act in real time against a moving target: The Coronavirus is a vicious virus which we have only begun to understand, let alone find a cure for. The options resemble a Rubik’s Cube of limitless possibilities..
On the other hand, our daily lives have become much simplified, reduced to priorities underscored by the same 3 simple messages (“Stay At Home”, “Protect the NHS” and “Save Lives”). And it is in simplicity that we will find some sort of salve, some kind of security as this crisis rages on. There is a design principle for keeping it simple in complicated and dangerous scenarios and it is called K.I.S.S which stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid” (although I prefer my great mentor Maya Angelou’s softer version which was “Keep It Simple, Sweetie”). K.I.S.S was first used in the 1930s by an American aerospace engineer at the famous Lockheed Skunk Works. Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson oversaw production of planes in World War II which were make-or-break not just for their pilots, but their country. He knew what a life-saving shortcut the principle of keeping things simple and focused was. He knew to that you had to design and build for simplicity, or his pilots could well be blown out of the sky.
KILLER COMPLEXITY
What a pity the K.I.S.S principle is no longer in popular usage today. In fact, we so take complexity for granted, simplicity has all but been forgotten. It certainly is no longer a priority. I wonder whether K.I.S.S was in action when two Boeing 737 crashed in 2018 and 2019. A total of 346 people lost their lives and it immediately became clear that there has been a terrible complexity around both humans and technology which might have played a part. In the aftermath it turned out that both humans and machines were to blame. There was a design flaw in new cockpit computer systems, Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) and when this combined with inexperienced pilots given very little training in the new system it proved catastrophic. The computer flaw started to push plane noses down and override pilot efforts to bring it back up. I would argue that when the K.I.S.S principle is overlooked it can genuinely be disastrous.
I often think of the pilots, in their frantic confusion, and I recall a syndrome I notice in my work when I counsel and coach executives in albeit less desperate circumstances who are haunted by overload. They often feel bound up by competing issues, their focus stressed. I call this the ‘C.A.T’ syndrome which stands for Complexity, Anxiety & (too little) Time. No-one can think straight if they are in the middle of something they just don’t understand, especially when the clock is ticking. Pressure to perform amidst muddle or mismanagement can makes things worse, disaster either narrowly averted or inevitable. How to minimize the markers of complexity? Recognise them, avoid them, and don’t sideline simplicity.
Pre-pandemic there wasn’t much simplicity in everyday life. Right now Techlash is suspended: there is a boom in Zoom and thank God I can Skype my 88 year old mum, (is anyone kvetching about invasion of privacy right now?). But the reality is that technology is not a completely simple solution and often creates the C.A.T syndrome in the first place. You know that feeling when opening different windows-within-windows, or being unable to find the download but you know it is in there somewhere, damnit, or wondering why that ten minutes you thought you were spending online has become an hour. I was in the middle of recording my podcast the other day and the internet crashed midway through. For ten agonizing minutes I had to figure out whether what we had recorded was backing up in the cloud anyway while my VIP guest waited patiently (miraculously it did) but digital connection is often far, far less straightforward than we’re led to believe or want to believe.
But out there in the world pre-pandemic and doubtless post-pandemic, daily modern life remains defined by complexity and it’s time to call it out. I was in New York last year when the lights went out around Times Square for several hours due to a power outage. Something to do with a substation. Several thousand people were affected, with hundreds stuck on dark subways or in elevators, while cars had to dodge out of action traffic lights. Everyone relied on battery life in mobile phones to power any communication but no-one really knew what was happening. Yet this was in Manhattan, home to the United Nations! Home to Wall Street, to Broadway. Frank Sinatra sang ‘If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere’ about this city! The fact that it happened in the middle of the twenty first century felt deeply weird and stressful — like if you have ever been on a plane when they announce apologetically that they have to reboot the system when you are mid-movie. First world problems, yes, but there’s no point in having a first world life if it can’t be sustained.
KNOWN UNKNOWNS
We all need a backup plan — as this pandemic has shown us. The Government had to scramble to put in place an entirely new set of strategies once the Coronovirus began lapping at European waters (how close we remain, even after Brexit). Once we knew we were a fortnight away for reaching Italy’s levels of death the Government acted. But the truth is that pandemic scenarios were completely known about and anticipated, as Bill Gates famously spoke about in his 2015 TED Talk.
We need to prepare ourselves far better mentally and practically for what has come to be known as ‘Known Unknowns’ after the much-derided statement by Donald Rumsfeld,
former Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld back in 2002 “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know”. It’s time to re-evaluate those words because they perfectly capture the madness of institutional complexity and how we overlook information them which is hiding in a thicket of complexity and we stop paying attention. Or, we have such blind faith in our systems that we don’t think the unthinkable and ask: “what could happen, even if we hope it won’t and even if we don’t think it will?”. Any combination of these attitudes, often created by complexity, can be deadly. A classic illustration of this is the NASA Columbia Shuttle disaster which has come to be known as ‘Death by Powerpoint’ and which took place just a year after Donald Rumsfeld’s prophetic remarks.
“The Columbia is a beautiful ship performing magnificently” one of the astronauts said happily on camera as the space shuttle was on its apparently normal descent to earth after a routine mission in February 2003. But moments later, something the BBC said “was so unlikely that no-one had ever considered it” happened, and the shuttle broke up, killing them and six others on board. This unlikely, unknown cause turned out to be a piece of foam coming loose and breaching the spacecraft wing: A true accident. However, there was another explanation. Evidence [1]suggests that these engineering problems were actually war-gamed. Someone had imagined it could happen, they just did not think that it would. So the scenario, known unknowns, was presented at NASA several months before the fateful flight. The data was by Powerpoint,[2] and in that presentation the attention of those present was dropped or lost. I imagine a dimly lit room with people being bombarded with information and not being able to process it fully, and tuning out.
‘Death by Powerpoint’, used to mean the deathly boredom of meetings, became all too true. Not surprising when you consider what the cognitive neuroscientist Torkel Klingberg says in his book The Overflowing Brain that “the torrent of information increases not only the volume of data we’re expected to take in but also the volume we need to shut out”
The Youtube footage of the Mission Control Room during the last moments of the Columbia Shuttle is so hard to watch. The Flight Director doesn’t know what we know because we know and back then, the future, hinging on known unknowns, had not happened. He is acting normally. Watchful, in control. He suspects nothing. He believes he knows his shuttle is coming back into land, safely. It is several long moments before he realizes. And in that moment, you see his face. It has a single, stricken tear rolling down his cheek. The camera swings to everyone else and they are frozen in empty horror. Every detail of their body language is searing to see. Because now they know.
Not Fooled by Randomness
Whilst it is true that you only know how risky some outside risk is when it happens — what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls ‘black swan’ events because they are so rare — the risk here was known, it was just presented so badly, and with such complexity, that it was not really considered to be a risk, even thought it was. Tragically, it was the perfect Known Unknown.
The risk here to the rest of us is clear. You have to imagine and anticipate known unknowns if you possibly can. And you have to realise that If you overload people, if you overdose them on information, they may drop attention just when they need it most. Look into your own situation: Can you see the wood for the trees? Would you be alert to the crucial information hiding amongst all the others? If not, can you simplify your systems, processes or the sheer volume of information to make the known unknown come to light?
I want to make the point, especially after the grim example of The Challenger, that there is plenty of success to be had in anticipating what you don’t know, and applying not just simplicity but a sort of surrender to that quest. Nassim Taleb is famous for his ‘black swan’ theory but he has also written brilliantly about randomness, and how to embrace what you don’t know. In his book ‘Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets” he writes that “Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.”.
My takeaway on Known Unknowns is really this: To miss something you could and should have predicted is inexcusable. But to not know something which you cannot know, is totally understandable. And different. So we can’t be afraid to explore what we haven’t discovered yet, or thought of yet. We have to ask questions a lot more — of ourselves, of our ‘experts’ and of anyone in a position of leadership. And our question need to be simple: What if this happened? Not ‘it won’t, it can’t’ but, ‘what if’?
In the aftermath of epic system failures of course no one individual is to blame. Only a bunch of complex computer systems, hyperconnected but not human, or a bunch of bureaucrats. Both have no face and no voice. Even when we bay for blood and get an individual it is rarely the full story, because most bungles or pure accidents are caused by errors within a complex centralised network of some kind. The chain of command to them is so wide and deep it is never easy to pinpoint who is in control, let alone who is to blame. But when one link goes down, or an error is not spotted and indeed spread by network effects we are instantly plunged into chaos, the Darth Vader of anyone who wants a simple, trackable, sensible set of solutions. Most of the time complexity is our enemy and not, repeat not, our friend.
SIMPLE SOLUTIONS
It is tempting to look back now and think life, pre-internet, pre-social media and pre-pandemic (when we get there) was simpler of course it wasn’t. It was just different. Charles Dickens wrote in the nineteenth century of Britain ‘being bound hand and foot in red tape’. Actual red tape still exists in the legal profession all over the world: documents are still bound up in a hangover from those times when complexity arose from our attempts to impose social and political order with taxes, laws and financial ‘instruments’.
But this present moment, where the whole world is strangely more united than at any time in over a century, we may have a unique opportunity to reset the dial and recalibrate how we live. So what’s the simple solution? We could start with remembering two simple words: Occam’s Razor. This refers to the fourteenth century British Franciscan Friar, William of Occam, who first articulated that simple works better than complicated when he wrote that “Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate” which for those of you who, like me, did not advance hugely in Latin at school, translates as “never undertake plurality without necessity”. I think it is a pretty good fourteenth century version of The Simplicity Principle.
Let’s remember that people like simplicity and crave it. The entire mindfulness movement is testament to the desire to connect to a more elemental and less frantic way of living. I like the 1972 Jonny Nash hit song “I Can See Clearly Now” with its wistful longing for “no obstacles in my way”. Politicians who recognize this get rewarded, wrongly criticized for being simplistic rather than what they are doing: identifying, voicing and connecting with the essence of what people want or need to do. So “Get Brexit Done” and “Stay at Home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives” is the rulebook of good political messaging. The alternative is the ‘tortuous complexity’ the Financial Times described about the run-up to Brexit. What people remember wasn’t the Remain campaign but the simple put-down that it became known for: “Project Fear”.
Successful brands know all about simplicity. Apple, of course. But start-ups like the Finnish satisfaction survey business Happy or Not is more recent. We’ve all pressed those simple big emoji buttons as we pass through airports or out of public loos. The most iconic design of simplicity in the last century is the London underground map designed by Harry Beck in 1931. Beautiful to look at and achingly simple, it has also been echoed wonderfully during the Coronovirus crisis by a simple visual meme showing the ‘journey’ we all make while staying at home.
I especially like the destination “Cluttered Drawer”.
But we can all keep it simple. We can be on the look out for tortuous complexity. We can call out mismanagement and time-wasting tasks. We can consciously sidestep getting sucked into the internet if we notice when we are doing it to avoid something else, perhaps even to avoid just being ourselves: Complex humans, yes, but people united by simple needs and aims. To be connected. To be understood. To do the right things.
The connection between simplicity and reality is far more sophisticated than it is often given credit for. Complexity is a cultural badge of honour and simplicity is somehow demeaned but let’s reverse this. Simplicity is the key to clarity which in turn is key to delivering successful results. So remember this one thing: Keep It Simple, Sweetie.
Adapted from The Simplicity Principle: Six Steps Towards Clarity in a Complex World by Julia Hobsbawm, out now. Follow @itsjuliahobsbawm on Instgram or subscribe up to her webinars and podcasts.
