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.

Mastering complexity

If you are passionate about what you do, there will always be more interesting things to say than time to say them.

But what to leave out?

The common approach is to collect all the things you could say and then shuffle things around, deleting a bit here and a bit there … only to discover that, well, it’s still a lot.

The thing is: deleting is hard. Because when you care you care for the details, too. And when you care for something, it’s hurts to delete that thing.

But what if you didn‘t have to delete things in the first place? What if instead of leaving things out it was all about including things?

As it turns out time and again in my workshops and in my coachings, this is the most satisfying way to master complexity, both for a speaker and even more so for their audiences.

To achieve this, you don’t start by collecting all the things that you could say. Instead, you start at the endpoint. What is it that your audience absolutely needs to understand? Not the ten most important things, nor the 3 most important things? But the most important thing.

This is only one thing.

And then you’ll continue just the same way. What is now the most important thing that you need to tell your audience in order to understand this?

And then you repeat this process. What’s the most important thing to relate to this? What’s one story to visualise that?

And again. And again. And again. At each step, you’ll include exactly one thing … until you’ve reached the point of no return. The point where your audience sees clearly. The point where they want you to give them all the details. Where complexity is what they seek.

This way, you don‘t have to delete any of the details that are so near and dear to you because you have only included those details that actually matter to your audience.

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Picture of Dr. Michael Gerharz

Dr. Michael Gerharz