We tend to view simplicity and complexity as opposites, like two sides of a teeter-totter: when one goes up the other goes down. But this isn’t true. The enemy of simplicity isn’t complexity, but messiness. Likewise, the enemy of complexity isn’t simplicity, but also messiness. Complexity and simplicity are both fighting on the same side—the side of increasing order. While complexity seeks order through addition, simplicity seeks it through subtraction. Together they produce richness and usability, two complementary values that have driven the whole of evolution.
The phrase “To be or not to be” is a simple string of words, and each word in it is equally simple. But the meaning behind the phrase is profoundly complex. Namely, why is life worth living? It’s not only the basis of a great play, but of the world’s great philosophies and religions. Therefore, is “To be or not to be” a simple question, or a complex one?
As I write this sentence on my MacBook Air, I can’t help but notice how effortless the interface is. The keyboard is delicate and responsive to the touch; the screen reports back instantly with perfect fidelity; and the whole machine performs like an extension of my mind and fingertips. Yet I’m perfectly aware that this is a complicated machine. It’s jam-packed with processors and memory chips and controllers and batteries and cards and cables and LEDs and speakers and other miracles of miniaturization, and each of these is the product of many minds and many years of cooperation and competition. So, is a MacBook Air a simple product, or a complex one?
It may be helpful to think of simplicity and complexity as a combo-concept called simplexity. Simplexity stands in opposition to disorder, to entropy, to the messiness that has no meaning.
There’s nothing valuable about a mess. It offers complexity without clarity. How do you describe the rubble left by the path of a tornado? The only way to describe it is by calling it a mess, since only the actual mess can describe itself. The problem with messes is that one looks a lot like another. One cluttered website looks a lot like another cluttered website. One “comprehensive” product offering looks much like another comprehensive product offering. One convoluted business model is no different—nor more valuable—than any other one. A mess is counterproductive when you’re trying to create meaningful differentiation or a competitive advantage.
You know you’ve found simplexity when you can describe a complicated entity using just a few words, a brief formula, or a clearly conceived diagram. When JetBlue says every passenger flies business class for the price of coach, they’ve encapsulated their entire value proposition in one sentence. But when American Airlines says passengers can fly without putting their lives on hold, they’re unable to find a competitive advantage other than wi-fi. One unfocused airline looks a lot like another to most people. American’s difficulty in expressing a clear value proposition reveals a lack of simplexity.
In The User Illusion, Tor Nørretranders introduces the term exformation to describe how meaning is created. He says that the real value of a message or a product doesn’t come from its final content, but from the content that’s been discarded along the way—its exformation. The more exformation, the more valuable the information.
For example, by writing 500 words off the top of my head to describe a new product, I could quickly create a page of text. But I’d also be creating a more difficult task for my reader, who now has to sift through my rambling sentences to extract any useful ideas. In systems terminology, I’d be shifting the burden to my reader; in the language of economics, I’d be externalizing the costs of communication. The value of my work would be low.
But let’s say I labored a bit longer on my text, making sure I had the key ideas in place, that they were revealed in a logical order, that the language was crisp and clear, and that all needless words and ideas had been stripped out as exformation. Even though my text has shrunk to only 200 words, it’s now many times more valuable than the original 500-word mess. My reader will be able to quickly read it and digest it, and easily remember it and act on it.
When you apply the principle of exformation to a message, you increase its meaning, and therefore its value. The amount of meaning that can be easily extracted from a message is called its logical depth. According to IBM Fellow Charles Bennett, the more “calculating time” a sender invests—either in his head or on a computer—the more meaning the receiver will get from it, and the greater its logical depth.
In the world of fashion, Tomas Maier works hard to eliminate all the unnecessary elements in his designs. He doesn’t stop until a shirt or a dress reaches a state he calls “a certain nothingness.” Sometimes, he says, “you look at a piece of abstract art and it’s just, like, a line, and somebody standing next to you says, ’I could do that.’ Well, actually—no.” Not unless you first spend a decade or so absorbing the lessons of your discipline, then bring your work to a high level of simplexity.
Simplexity does not imply subtraction alone. If you threw out half the parts in a laptop, you might achieve simplicity, but the product wouldn’t work. To retain the richness of simplexity, you need compression, not reduction. You need to figure out how to squeeze all the goodness of a complex solution into a package that’s easy to use. Think about the electrical grid that brings power into your house. The grid itself is fairly complex, but you don’t have to worry about that. All you do is flip the switch. The rest of the system is hidden on the other side of the wall.
Apple’s lead designer, Jonathan Ive, says his task is “to solve incredibly complex problems and make their resolution appear inevitable and incredibly simple, so that you have no sense how difficult it was.” Maybe this is what Leonardo meant when he called simplicity the ultimate sophistication.
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