Complexity sells better

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better. – Edsger Dijkstra

Because when it’s more complex it must be more elaborate. More powerful. Better thought through.

Only that it isn’t … because the only reason that it is so very complex is precisely because the team was too lazy to take it one step further. To invest the hard work to make it simpler. To educate themselves about different perspectives. To appreciate the connections that this education makes us see among the dots.

Complexity is deceptive. It suggests sophistication and hides the fact that the opposite is true. Moreover, if it’s hard to understand, then it must be proof for how clever we are. But it’s not. It’s much rather proof for that we stopped thinking at that level of complexity. That we shied away from cracking the complexity.

If we’re able to make the complex simple and then, if we go even further so that we can explain it in simple terms … that’s sophistication.