Why Does Complexity Exist?

Complexity is a tricky concept because it’s relative.

Within an organization, something can be more complex than another thing, and looking outwards, we can also look at the relative complexity compared to how other organizations approach a similar challenge.

Complexity also comes in two forms: natural and manufactured.

• Natural complexity arises inevitably through regulatory constraints, operating in multiple countries, and having many different revenue lines
• Manufactured complexity is added intentionally or unintentionally through our choices, sometimes serving a purpose, but often occurs through suboptimal design, accumulated technical debt, or attempts to artificially demonstrate value

It’s critical to understand whether your complexity is necessary or unnecessary.

• Necessary complexity is often natural, although it can also be manufactured, like forcing people to use two-factor authentication codes for improved security or requiring multiple checks and balances to prevent holes from aligning (the Swiss cheese metaphor)
• Unnecessary complexity is almost always manufactured, in the sense that we have made choices to do things that result in consequences, whether it be ignoring governance on business process changes, having a hard to use system, or asking people to do menial and manual tasks

Most organizations can only control manufactured complexity.

Thus, our goal is to have as little unnecessary, manufactured complexity as possible.

That may sound obvious, although practically every client that I work with has unnecessary, manufactured complexity.

The reason for this is because they’ve become conditioned to expect that level of complexity is normal, and changing from something they know is harder to do than just implementing a simpler solution.

TLDR: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to eliminate unnecessary complexity within your organization.

P.S. I'm curious... what's one thing in your organization that you think is unnecessarily complex? Hit reply and let me know.