So, where does complexity come from?
As a product manager in tech who is paradoxically also an artist, I think about complexity a lot. In both my work and my art, complexity sometimes seems to arrive out of nowhere and I’m left asking myself — now, I wasn’t really expecting that, how did it happen?
That’s hardly unique now, is it. At some point or the other — on a certain project, in your life, a situation, your startup, or a relationship — complexity creeps in and leaves you wondering why, as you yearn for the simpler version of it. Sometimes you take matters in your own hands and try to simplify things. Sometimes you learn to manage the complexity better. Sometimes you just learn to live with it. And sometimes, more often than not, it actually becomes more complex. And like clockwork, the process of wondering and simplifying begins again.
Every day the world over, we introduce new ideas, products and services to make our lives easier and simpler. In doing so, also every day we introduce new concepts, systems, processes, & organizations that over time become more and more complex in pursuing those ultimate and utopian goals of making things simpler. At a macro level, I find it all a bit amusing. But I digress, more on that later. Maybe.
Poor complexity has become notoriously undesirable. You don’t (usually) have a team sitting and doing a retrospective on a project and wondering why things weren’t complex enough. You don’t have a partner breaking up with you because things weren’t complex enough (I hope not!). I don’t know how hunter-gatherer types felt way back in the day but I imagine they had some amount of complexity in their nomadic life that first made them realize it would be simpler to just start settling down somewhere. As an artist though you probably like complexity to some extent, but who can tell with us crazy types.
But in general complexity is like a guest at a party who just showed up uninvited. Sometimes you have a little brawl with it and kick it out, and things are great again, till another one of its’ annoying friends shows up knocking on the door.
But have you ever wondered what the root cause of all complexity is, though? Because we are so used to looking at it discretely in pretty much everything we do and experience, we often don’t realize where complexity actually comes from. Strangely, complexity doesn’t originate from complexity, or an ill-designed system, or a half-baked idea. Complexity comes, quite ruthlessly yet elegantly, from simplicity. Complexity is not the exception, it is the rule.
Wait, what does that even mean? Are you wondering why you are even reading this? It’s alright, I am also wondering why I am writing this so we’re even.
When I say complexity comes from simplicity, I think my mathematician friends reading this may realize where I am going with it. But as someone in no way qualified to speak of some of the mathematical concepts that inspire this idea, I’m trying to keep it simple so to speak and relate it to my worldly (and artly) experiences. Keeping it as simple as chaos can be, I mean. How simply a butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo can cause rainfall in New York Central Park. Ah, beautiful chaos.
Nature is teeming with chaos, if it isn’t chaos itself already. Weather patterns, trees, coastlines etc., seemingly complex things originating out of the simplest of equations, unpredictable because of their sensitivity to their original conditions. And don’t you forget, we are nature too. The notion of complexity from simplicity is woven into the fabric of our very existence — the way our universe has come to it’s current state, the way something as complex as our eyes have evolved over the millennia to help us have greater chances of survival. Complexity is not the anti-pattern, it is the pattern.
The two main components of chaos theory are the idea that systems — no matter how complex they may be — rely upon an underlying order, and that very simple or small systems and events can cause very complex behaviors or events.
Complexity is basically the laws of nature doing their job. What’s simple now by design will be complex at an indeterminate time. You can run, and you can hide, but complexity will find it’s way to you at some point. The question isn’t really where does complexity come from, but when. And of course, how you learn to deal with it.
